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CIVILISATION 
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The Gospel and Human Needs: being the 
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CIVILISATION 
AT THE CROSS ROADS 



FOUR LECTURES 

DELIVERED BEFORE HARVARD UNIVERSITY 

IN THE YEAR 1911 

ON THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE FOUNDATION 



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THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES 

This Lectureship was constituted a perpetual foundation 
in Harvard University in 1898, as a memorial to the late 
William Belden Noble of Washington, D. C. (Harvard, 
1885). The terms as revised by the founder and accepted 
by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, Novem- 
ber 26, 1906, provided that the lectures shall be delivered 
annually, and, if convenient, in the Phillips Brooks House 
during the season of Advent. It is left with the Corpora- 
tion to determine the number of lectures. Each lecturer 
shall have ample notice of his appointment, and the publica- 
tion of each course of lectures is required. The purpose of 
the Lectureship .will be further seen in the following citation 
from the deed of gift by which it was established : — 

"The object of the founder of the Lectures is to continue 
the mission of William Belden Xoble, whose supreme desire 
it was to extend the influence of Jesus as the way, the truth, 
and the life; to make known the meaning of the words of 
Jesus, 'I am come that they might have life, and that they 
might have it more abundantly.' In accordance with the 
large interpretation of the Influence of Jesus by the late 
Phillips Brooks, with whose religious teaching he in whose 
memory the Lectures are established and also the founder 
of the Lectures were in deep sympathy, it is intended that 
the scope of the Lectures shall be as wide as the highest inter- 
ests of humanity. With this end in view, — the perfection 
of the spiritual man and the consecration by the spirit of 
Jesus of every department of human character, thought, and 
activity, — the Lectures may include philosophy, literature, 
art, poetry, the natural sciences, political economy, sociol- 
ogy, ethics, history, both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as 
theology and the more direct interests of the religious life. 
Beyond a sympathy with the purpose of the Lectures, as 
thus defined, no restriction is placed upon the lecturer." 



FRATRI MEO CARISSIMO 

S. B. P. 



PREFACE 

Mystical titles are not much in fashion. Yet 
I have kept the alternative names of each 
Lecture, because they suggest even more than 
they express of the nature of the book. Their 
apocalyptic associations may also serve to 
guard against misconception. The title of the 
whole course and certain criticisms in the first 
Lecture might seem to imply that I desire to 
controvert the main . thesis of the late Father 
Tyrrell's famous work. This, however, is not 
the case. Too greatly am I in debt to all the 
writings of that arresting author and especially 
to his posthumous work to have any such 
thought. But I do desire to point out that 
the problem can be studied from more stand- 
points than one. Something is crumbling all 
around us. That is clearer every moment. I 
write this on the day of the introduction of the 
Bill for a Minimum Wage. Is it Christianity 
that is decaying, or civilisation in its existing 
shape? That conventional Christianity is going 
or gone, no one will question. So much 



x PREFACE 

the better. But on the whole it seems to me, 
that what is vanishing is not that peculiar 
kind of social life we call the Christian Church, 
except certain accidental elements inextricably 
bound up with the existing regime. Rather, 
we are in the midst of a process not unlike that 
of Western Europe in the Fifth Century, when 
the world-organisation was on its deathbed, 
and the Church alone remained unshaken. The 
more I contemplate the face of things the more 
does there come before me the vision of a whole 
order changing. In a few years, we shall, 
perhaps, be saying something like what Luther 
said three centuries and a half ago about the 
Holy Roman Empire : — 

"Die Welt ist am Ende kommen, das romisch 
Reich ist fast dahin und zerrissen." This 
change is universal; but the Christian Church 
will survive it, on the very ground that it pos- 
sesses many elements incompatible with our 
present system, and that its spirit is the scorn 
of all that is fashionably enlightened. That 
scorn will doubtless be the fortune of the present 
volume. Indeed this must be the case with 
any attempt to commend the traditional faith 
in an age which finds interest in any and every 
fantasy, but dismisses a priori the Catholic 
creed. I am not however greatly disturbed by 
this thought. The mental habit of our day, 



PREFACE xi 

like other of its qualities does not appear to me 
so profound or lasting; and will undergo "a 
sea-change into something rich and strange" 
along with the other elements in our life. Thus 
if it should seem that these lectures are so many 
" Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen," I should not 
grieve. They may not fit with the prevailing 
fashion among the "intellectuels." It is at 
least not inconceivable that the ground of this 
is that there is something imperfect in that 
fashion. A thing is out of date, because it 
looks to the future, no less than when it harks 
back to the past. 

After this course was delivered, there was pub- 
lished in England a volume directly traversing 
that view of the nature of the Christian experi- 
ence which is set out in the fourth lecture. 
Since the book appeared of some importance, 
owing to the controversy which it evoked, I 
have thought it well to devote an appendix to 
the general historical question which it involves. 
I suppose that no one who has watched the rise 
and fall of the uncounted historical theories, all 
plausible, which have appeared in regions far 
removed from the fever spot of Christian origins, 
is likely to be disturbed by Mr. Thompson's 
hypothesis. Since, however, these topics are 
oftentimes debated by persons whose acquaint- 
ance with general historical investigation is 



xii PREFACE 

other than obvious, I have thought it well to 
indicate some points a little more at large. In 
that appendix I should like to have quoted 
pages from the Chapter on "Causality and 
Natural Law," in Professor Wendland's ad- 
mirable book Miracles and the Christian 
Church. But I read it too recently to make 
that possible. I would also refer to some re- 
marks of Professor James Ward in the earlier 
part of his new series of Gifford Lectures — 
Pluralism and Theism, which bear on the 
relation of historical knowledge and real indi- 
viduality to all theories of inevitable, unbroken 
cosmic development, mechanically interpreted. 
Here I would only repeat with emphasis my 
persuasion that it is only after a judgment of 
the total character of the. Christian experience, 
that we ever can (or ever do) profitably ap- 
proach the investigation of its details. This 
is true on both sides, and is shewn in the present 
controversy. It is precisely this total super- 
natural character, which I believe to be as 
firmly established historically as anything of 
that nature can ever be — and to be disbe- 
lieved only on account of presuppositions in- 
compatible with its truth. In this respect and 
certain others these lectures may serve as a 
sort of sequel to the earlier course delivered at 
Cambridge on the foundation of Dr. Hulse; 



PREFACE xiii 

and may correct certain misconceptions, es- 
pecially in regard to the third. 

With slight alterations these lectures are 
printed substantially as they were delivered. 
Never a member of that company which re- 
gards a book as likely to promote the glory of 
God in proportion as it is ill written, I have 
taken pains to make it readable. But I cannot 
pretend to be satisfied with the result. Further 
delay, however, must not be thought of and 
such as it is, the book must go forth. 

The Rev. Alexander Wicksteed is deeply my 
creditor. Owing to his kindness in reading the 
proofs and verifying references, I trust that the 
proportion of errors is less than has sometimes 
been the case with writings of the author; or 
than always would be without such aid. 

Finally, I must tender my grateful thanks to 
the authorities of Harvard University, who by 
appointing me to this office of Noble Lecturer 
are "the only begetters' 5 of th,e ensuing pages: 
I would hereby assure them that I would the 
book were more worthy of its "domicile of 
origin 5 ' and that I shall not soon forget the 
days that I spent in the enjoyment of their 
proverbial hospitality. 

J. Neville Figgis. 

House of the Resurrection, 
March 21, 1912. 



CONTENTS 

I. Armageddon or the Intellectual Chaos . 3 

II. Babylon or the Moral Crisis .... 65 

III. Calvary or the Challenge of the Cross 121 

IV. Sion or the Christian Fact 179 

Appendix. King Richard the Third and the 

Reverend James Thompson 235 

Notes 273 



CIVILISATION 
AT THE CROSS ROADS 



CIVILISATION AT 
THE CROSS ROADS 

LECTURE I 

ARMAGEDDON OR THE INTELLECTUAL 
CHAOS 

Not long since a writer, who seemed to 
wield flame rather than words, directed 
all our thoughts to the topic of Christianity 
at the Cross Roads. And indeed the tragedy 
of Tyrrell's own life symbolised that crisis 
in thought of which the book was the 
expression. More than any of his works 
was his life an illustration of the momen- 
tous problems urgent at this moment on 
all reflecting men. How far can the new 
wine of modern knowledge and changed 
ways of thought be poured into the old 
bottles of traditional religion? Is the Chris- 
tian Church (with whatever modifications) 
still to remain the depositary of the spiritual 
experience of the race, the dispenser of 
the gifts of grace, the home of the soul, 
and the instrument of air redemption; or 

2 3 



4 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

shall that supernatural claim be rejected 
as a phantom or transcended as a phase 
of history now drawing to its close? Allied 
to this topic there is another no less mo- 
mentous, — that is, the condition, not of 
the Church, but of civilisation. Tyrrell 
appears to have thought that the knowl- 
edge of our day and its theories were so 
secure as to enable us from that standpoint 
to sit in judgment on the strange events 
which gave rise to the Christian Church, 
and also that the gifts of twentieth century 
civilisation were so strongly entrenched 
behind the walls of physical science that 
they could not be lost. Transferred they 
might be, say, to the yellow races, Europe 
reverting to another dark age; but lost, 
like the culture of the ancient world before 
the barbarian, that is not to be thought of. 
Neither of these statements appears to 
me to be justified. In the first place there 
are so many aspects of life which our 
present day civilisation either ignores or 
depreciates that I fail to see how we can 
take its principles for anything more than 
a partial and abstract account of certain 
elements of the world. These elements 



ARMAGEDDON 5 

indeed it enables us to control. And we 
have achieved therein a success without 
parallel in the past and with yet greater 
promise for the future. But I do not 
conceive the scientific or mathematical 
temperament as in any way final. Large 
elements of life, the artistic, the social, the 
personal, it cannot handle, and when it tries 
to do so it is apt to come to grief, and this 
quite apart from religion. One side of sci- 
ence indeed, its reverence for fact, is lead- 
ing it to recognise an element best described 
as supernatural in human life, and also to 
confess its own impotence to offer any 
interpretation of the world as a whole. 
Yet the scientific temperament, in ordinary 
speech, means more than this. It implies 
an assumption that knowledge can be 
arranged on a schematic basis, and that 
all events can be viewed as the unalterable 
issue of the past, because everything is 
bound together by the nexus of cause and 
effect mechanically interpreted, and there 
are in life no new beginnings. This assump- 
tion is opposed to any such scheme as the 
Christian, which teaches not merely a 
spiritual universe behind the natural, but 



6 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

also the existence of a multitude of spirits 
with a real, though limited, freedom and 
shews us a world whose issues are unpre- 
dictable, with as many loose ends as there 
are individuals, instead of the rounded 
system of the universe totus teres atque 
rotundus, which, though far from being 
demonstrated or demonstrable, is the un- 
alterable dogma of many modern enquirers. 
Dr. Bussell shews how fatal this notion is 
to all belief in real individuality. 1 "Such 
theoretical doubt can never seriously im- 
pair the vital impulse, the enjoyment of 
the struggle and doubtful issue. Perhaps 
a more urgent, serious danger lies in the 
strange hybrid of philosophic and reli- 
gious thought, the metaphysical mysticism 
which disconcertingly alternates emotion 
and logic. To this reference has been and 
will be so frequent that it is needless to 
enlarge upon the obvious defect it shares 
with all previous and kindred systems. 
It neither explains nor justifies the per- 
sonal, which, whether by accident or 
providence or by sonic inscrutable yet 
purposive law, seems to have been the 
goal of development on the earth. After 



ARMAGEDDON 7 

"the painful discovery of the self as the 
"true seed of philosophy, practical ethics, 
"religion, and political agitation, it is use- 
" less to point out that the discovery is, after 
"all, worthless. We are still left with an 
"acute sense of its truth. But we can more 
" easily shake off a scientific fatalism which 
"momentary experience contradicts (at least 
"so far as our feelings go) than the benumb- 
"ing influence of Pantheism." 

These assumptions of the scientific imagi- 
nation are not incompatible with religion 
of a sort. The prevalence of Pantheism is 
easy to reconcile with the presuppositions 
of the mechanical temperament, which are 
dominant far beyond the limits of physical 
enquiry, and indeed are chiefly dangerous 
in that of morals and religion. 2 It is not 
to science, but to "scientific fatalism/' as 
it has been well termed, that our difficulties 
are due. Only when science captures the 
imagination and seeks to subdue history, 
philosophy, and the individual life does 
she conflict with our religion. It is on 
these assumptions that popular objections 
to the Christian faith are based. The 
dislike of miracles, more particularly of the 



8 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Birth and Resurrection narratives, the 
hostility to the supernatural claims of 
Christ, to the doctrines of redemption and 
the sacramental gifts, in a word to the whole 
theology of grace, all this, so far as most 
men are concerned, has little basis beyond 
the suspicion that science can find no place 
for them and the assumption that science 
covers the ground. True, indeed, the world 
of fact, historical, artistic, personal, gives 
it the lie, and the moment you stop reason- 
ing and start to live, the difficulties dis- 
appear. But it is just these facts that 
men obsessed by the dominant categories 
refuse to look at. There are on the one 
hand the practical achievements of science, 
denied by no one; results on the other side 
are less apparent, and even if admitted are 
supposed to be susceptible of explanation. 
The greatest achievements of all, the 
peace of God ruling in the heart of the 
redeemed and the conversion of sinners, 
cannot, owing to their very magnitude and 
psychical nature, be represented to those 
without. And so minds enchained to the 
categories of continuity, of inevitable evo- 
lution, the laws of cause and effect mechani- 



ARMAGEDDON 9 

cally understood, all different names of the 
same notion, fall an easy prey to the deter- 
minist theory of personal action and the 
rationalistic projection of history. They 
treat as anthropomorphic and antiquated 
the world-old notions of sin and deliver- 
ance and crave for a vision cosmic and 
universal. So far as the mass of men 
goes, this tendency is only beginning, but 
if it be developed to the full it will 
sweep away with it all that is of value 
in our world. For Western civilisation, 
inherited from the Christendom of the 
Middle Ages, has been built on the faith in 
personal values and the reality of freedom. 3 
This faith is now menaced, and in many 
places gone. It is largely lacking in the 
more characteristic products of the present 
day — all that seems most modern and 
freest from the past. Thus it is true to 
say that civilisation is at the cross roads. 
There is a ceaseless conflict between ideals 
which rest on the personal spiritual claims 
of the Christian life and that rigid mechan- 
ism to which many would reduce it; while, 
even among those who retain or revive 
their faith in freedom, some deny in toto the 



10 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Christian aim. So far as the Western mind 
has been moving away from personal factors 
(including of course those social unions in 
which alone personality can thrive) it is 
becoming more and more enslaved to 
categories which make Christianity appear 
not so much false as meaningless. 4 I may 
quote two instances. An agnostic friend 
once wrote to me, "I have never been able 
to make any meaning out of Revealed 
Religion." Another friend, not agnostic, 
once said, "I am interested in the cosmic 
and philosophical; you in the personal and 
redemptive. All that I have to learn. I 
hardly know what the words mean." That 
is the condition which the Christian has 
now to face — people who do not know what 
the words mean. 

Moreover, the civilisation which the 
Western world inherits was erected on 
the belief that human nature through 
some act had fallen so low that it could 
only be raised by some power from with- 
out, and that redemption was brought by 
Jesus Christ and mediated by the Church. 
Such a doctrine of the fall, however quali- 
fied, seems out of relation to ideas now 



ARMAGEDDON 11 

fashionable, and the notion of redemption 
supernaturally achieved is quietly dropped. 
Further, there is a deeper tendency at work. 
This, while not denying God's existence, 
would confine Him to this life, and resents 
all claims that are fundamentally super- 
natural. Religion is in this view an idyll 
of human life, the uprising of the soul of 
man, but God never entered the world, 
never could enter it save as immanent in 
the whole of its growth; there are no 
violent breaks, no catastrophes, no unique 
personalities, no really new events. All 
goes on developing by a continuous process; 
religion, like the world, will ultimately 
destroy itself. 

It is the aim of these lectures to traverse 
this view, to give grounds for holding that 
the world, as it now is, bears on the face 
of it the marks which call for redemption; 
that Christianity comes to us alone pro- 
fessing to have this power from beyond, 
and alone able to meet the universal need 
of deliverance. If the civilised world, saved 
by a remnant of faithful, accepts this 
evangel, it may rise to heights undreamed 
of. If, as many indications suggest, the 



12 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

world at large rejects it, then civilisation 
may proceed on its course of God-denial 
for some generations or even centuries, 
but it is doomed like the ancient world; 
for no culture can go on existing with- 
out faith, and the forces of materialism 
already looming as a cloud will gather 
volume, until the land of the spirit is over- 
shadowed. 

For all changes notwithstanding, and 
with admitted modifications in details, the 
Christian Church faces men today, not as 
a theory but as a life, giving to many 
amongst us a sense of supernatural vision 
and redemptive peace to be gained nowhere 
else — hardly even offered. There, as a 
fact, is the spiritual home of many. Are 
there good grounds for deserting this refuge? 
Is the mental house of our life so compact 
and guarded that we can trust to it apart 
from this other? Does life, as we watch 
or feel it, allow or repudiate the sense that 
man needs deliverance? Is there among 
all opposing theories any one so certain or 
so comprehensive that it compels us to 
reject these venerable claims — claims not 
merely of the past, but effective now? To 



ARMAGEDDON 13 

these questions I shall seek to make some 
reply in the following four lectures. 

In the first, surveying the world of men's 
reflections, I shall try to shew that the one 
outstanding feature is an anarchy without 
parallel, and that, in regard alike to funda- 
mental beliefs or practical claims, however 
loud or insistent be the voices which bid 
us reject the Christian claim, they are in 
no way so united or so well grounded as to 
settle the matter a "priori; they may not 
assist, they do not inhibit the faith of the 
Gospel. In the second lecture we shall 
glance at some of the outward features of 
the world, which indicate that human nature 
needs to be redeemed and lacks the force 
to effect deliverance for itself. Then, hav- 
ing dealt with the present situation, I shall 
in the third lecture endeavour to display 
the gigantic nature of the Christian claim, 
how the belief in the life beyond, in the 
love of God, in the gifts of grace, must 
change all our standards, so that Christians, 
whether or no they are better, are amazingly 
different from other folks; while the attempt 
to represent Christianity either as a sort of 



14 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

decorated idealism or as a mere emotional 
altruism must be foredoomed to failure. 
Finally, in the fourth lecture, I shall dis- 
cuss the alleged facts that lie at the bottom. 
We shall see there that the facts of the 
life of Jesus are one with the history of 
the Church and the experience of the indi- 
vidual Christian, that the problem is con- 
cerned with the nature of that experience. 
Of that experience there are two interpre- 
tations, the natural and the supernatural. 
We shall see that the latter is that which 
best correlates all the evidence, provided 
we are not inhibited from holding it through 
prepossessions derived from other sources. 
We shall conclude that if we believe the 
spiritual aspirations of mankind to be 
rooted in reality, the Christian as a member 
of the great Catholic, i.e., universal, society 
is the person most closely in touch with 
that reality; for he and he alone is at the 
centre of the spiritual experience of the 
race, and there in the Catholic Church he 
drinks "within beneath a spring," which is 
the fount and source of all redemption. 

I said "in the Catholic Church/ 1 Here 
and elsewhere in these lectures I shall use 



ARMAGEDDON 15 

phrases or make statements with which 
some here will not agree. I cannot help it. 
Indeed it had been my hope to exclude 
such things; the more especially as I hold 
most firmly that all those who have a 
hold on the supernatural are being pressed 
together (not always with their own good- 
will) under the force of the attack. Of 
course I am using the term Church in the 
true sense, as the society of all the baptized, 
leaving out all the questions of organisation, 
of discipline, which divide men still further. 
Still there is no use saying that all nominal 
Christians are the same, when they are 
obviously different, or that there is no dis- 
tinction between a Christian and a moralist. 
Moreover, a man's view of things is no mere 
theory; it is a part of him and must colour 
what he says. It is safer to avow it frankly 
beforehand than to make a profession of 
impartiality, which is always a delusion 
and in nine cases out of ten an imposture. 
If the Catholic principle be a matter of life 
even more than theory, that life is bound 
to shew itself in one who possesses or, to 
be accurate, is possessed by it. Nor indeed 
would I have dared to insult this great 



16 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

University, which has given to me an office 
so honourable, by coming from Europe in 
order to say not what I do mean, but what 
I do not; or to omit integral elements in 
what is the very life of my spirit. You do 
not want in this place colourless nothings 
or the enunciation of sentiments which 
seem obvious because they are vital to no 
man's faith. You want a man with a man's 
hopes and doubts, his visions and his 
failures — all that he most vitally is — not 
a set of abstract theses, dialectically argued. 
If, therefore, anything said here may 
seem to wound or set at naught the con- 
victions of some who value the Christian 
name, or of some who do not, I can but 
crave your pardon and beg you to believe 
that I have set down nothing in malice, 
that I speak to you, as a priest in the Church 
of God, for that faith which lives in me. 
May He grant that the words be not all 
in vain. 



In an arresting novel one of the most 
remarkable men of the last century wrote 
as follows: "Progress to what and from 



ARMAGEDDON 17 

whence? Amid empires shrivelled into 
deserts, amid the wrecks of great cities, a 
single column or obelisk of which nations 
import for the prime ornament of their 
mud-built capitals; amid arts forgotten, 
commerce annihilated, fragmentary litera- 
tures, and populations destroyed, the Euro- 
pean talks of progress, because by an 
ingenious application of some scientific 
acquirements he has established a society 
which has mistaken comfort for civilisation." 
Perhaps not many now read Tancred. 5 
Yet that book is far more than mere 
romance. It is evidence of the dissatis- 
faction with modern civilisation, and its 
parvenu vanity felt even at that time by 
an acute observer. You know the theme; 
how the young English lord, weary of the 
intellectual and moral chaos of the West, 
sought in the East for that spiritual force 
which alone would raise Europe from her 
degradation. As he puts it, "Excepting 
those who still cling to your Arabian creeds, 
Europe is without consolation"; or again, 
"Amid the wreck of creeds, the crash of 
Empires, French revolutions and English 
reforms, Catholicism in agony, Protes- 

3 



18 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

tantism in convulsions, Europe demands 
the keynote which none can sound. If 
Asia be in decay, Europe is in confusion. 
Your repose may be death, but our life is 
anarchy/ ' 

These passages, and still more the general 
argument of the book, bring out the fact 
that in the mind of an observer whose 
allegiance to orthodox Christianity was 
not otherwise conspicuous, the spectacle 
of the Western world — for we must take 
the whole West together — presented itself 
in somewhat different colours from the rose 
tints it took on in the imaginations of that 
Manchester school which was then at the 
height of its power; that civilisation in the 
West, so far as we can separate its life and 
culture from the Christian forces, on which 
it still largely lives, is not in a state of which 
we are to be hilariously proud; that it needs 
redemption, that redemption must come 
from without and must take on a super- 
natural, transcendent character, and cannot 
come from a development of the principles 
of the Exchanges. It will involve in some 
degree those principles of asceticism and 
other-worldliness popularly regarded as 



ARMAGEDDON 19 

specifically Oriental, and inextricably in- 
volved in the Catholic religion as a spiritual 
society. 

We are not, be it observed, drawing a 
Rousseauesque indictment against civilisa- 
tion and exalting the noble savage quand 
meme. For civilisation works hand in hand 
with religion, in so far as it treats men as 
ends not means, and by its ordered variety 
of life gives freer place to development. It 
is just these things, however, that are in 
question today; there we are at the Cross 
Roads. They are right who speak of the 
"Gifts of Civilisation' ' as they see the 
Church and culture marching hand in hand 
in the warfare with barbarism and un- 
ordered passion. Only, while civilisation 
begins by ministering to man as a spiritual 
being, by making freedom and all personal 
values a reality and preserving space for 
that leisure of spirit in which the peace of 
God may reign, it by no means ends at 
that point. Apart from a Godward out- 
look it may tend to destroy these personal 
values by permitting men to rest in the 
"much goods laid up in store" and allow 
the fortunate in a purely materialist ambi- 



20 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

tion, while from its true benefits the masses 
of mankind may become more and more 
shut out. This has been its great vice in 
past history. It looks a little as though it 
were being repeated in the present. Do we 
not see before us a world intoxicated with 
material prosperity, reckless of the life of 
the spirit, and callous to the misery of vast 
masses of its fellow-men? 

We may look back to the age when these 
spiritual ends of civilised life were partially 
attained and all its treasures enjoyed as the 
gift of God, but can the modern world 
claim as its own the glories of the ages 
which, so far from being dark, are still the 
refuge of souls wearied with the squalid 
fever of our time? It cannot. We must 
admit the profound difference between 
the thoughts and feelings of our own day 
and those of the age which produced the 
Sainte-Chapelle, the frescoes of Giotto, and 
the Divina Commedia. Nor would any 
statistics about railroads and steamships 
ever persuade me that a world of which 
these things are the characteristic symbols 
is inferior to that which flowers in the 
factory town or the mammoth hotel. 



ARMAGEDDON 21 

Medieval civilisation was no flawless 
crystal. Then as now many men gave 
free play "to the lust of the flesh, the lust 
of the eyes, and the pride of life," but they 
did not worship these things. In all ages 
men have been bad. But the achievements 
of the thirteenth century were owing pre- 
cisely to the opposite of these elements 
men most admire today. As a hostile 
writer puts it, "they had one idee fixe, 
religion." They may not have always 
served God very well, but they knew that 
He was "the chief end of man." That 
world presents neither the oleographic pic- 
ture dear to sentimentalists, nor yet the 
mere battle of kites and crows conceived 
by Puritan and Renaissance pride. Yet its 
most notable qualities — the things that 
made it what it was — the cathedral, the 
minster, the university (and each of us 
here owes more to the University of the 
Middle Ages than he is apt to imagine), the 
orders of chivalry, the hierarchy of society, 
the communal life and all its pageantry, 
that unity which outlasted so much con- 
flict, all these things were what they were 
because of men's faith in God and man 



22 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

and the love which makes him free. None 
of them could have been at all in the form 
they took, had that faith not been present; 
and hence Walter Pater, summing up the 
qualities of the differing cultures of the 
world, speaks in the famous passage on 
Mona Lisa of "the reverie of the middle 
age with its spiritual ambitions and im- 
aginative souls' ' as contrasted with "the 
animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the 
return of the Pagan world, the sins of the 
Borgias." Always rather by its ideals 
than its achievements do we judge a nation 
or epoch. These ideals can be seen re- 
flected as in a mirror all through the life 
of the Middle Ages, in the peace as of a 
strange land which pervades the Historia 
Ecclesiastica of the great Northumbrian 
monk, the Venerable Bede, in the love and 
universal reverence felt for S. Francis even 
in his lifetime, in the mystery plays like 
Everyman, in the almost autocratic influ- 
ence of a mystic like S. Bernard, even indeed 
in the strength of the Papacy (for it rested 
not on material force, but on the faith of 
men), above all in the most characteristic 
of all its fruits — books such as The Imi- 



ARMAGEDDON 23 

tation of Christ, similar works like the 
writings of Walter Hilton, or Richard Rolle, 
or Dame Julian, the anchoress of Norwich. 
All these are the natural fruit of the time; 
they express its spirit. So far as we have 
anything like them, it is rather as protests, 
reactions, the work of those who repudiate 
the prevalent ideals, unzeitgemasse Betracht- 
ungen, as Nietzsche would call them. No 
one can deny the beauty of a work like 
the Pathway of the Eternal Wisdom or 
Tyrrell's Oil and Wine, but their distinction 
consists in thus expressing a side of life far 
from popular. The dominant feeling of 
the age shrieks itself hoarse in the news- 
papers and expresses itself artistically in 
the New Machiavelli or Ulle des Pinguins, 
and I cannot feel convinced that we have 
gained by the exchange. 

The world in the Middle Ages was far 
enough from the practice of holiness, but 
at least it did not question the ideal. What 
are men's ideals today? It would be hard 
to tell. But so far as their main energies 
are concerned and we can form any judg- 
ment as to what animates the man in the 
street, I cannot doubt that it is truer to say 



24 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

that Christianity runs counter to our civil- 
isation than that it fulfils it. In places 
indeed it remains intact, but they are as a 
rule those least touched by modern develop- 
ments. The village church is the home of 
an immemorial piety alike in Bavaria or 
in Italy, in England or Ireland — I suppose 
also here; though this statement must be 
made with very large reserves, for there are 
districts abroad of which the very opposite 
is true, and I fancy that in some colonial 
places there would be an equal lack. But 
can that or anything like it be said either 
of the most educated or the most modern 
elements of society? Is it not rather the 
case, as one wrote to me of the business 
world, "Christianity counts for nothing, 
men simply leave it alone"? Or as another, 
an educated woman, said of a sermon on 
penitence, "It seemed to me all so unreal; 
I wondered how many of the people in 
that church had any inkling of what was 
meant"? That is the point; the ordinary 
Christian doctrines of grace, and sin, and 
pardon have become almost meaningless 
to many, and require translation before 
people will even listen to them. The phrases 



ARMAGEDDON 25 

of the New Testament seem to savour of 
the Sunday School novelette and have lost 
their vital force. Canon Carnegie, indeed, 
seems to desire to take this condition as 
a standard and to make the ordinarv man's 
dislike of such terms as holiness or sin a 
reason for leaving the things out of our 
message. In his preface to Churchmanship 
and Character 6 he writes that "Christians 
to a large extent use a language which is 
not understood by ordinary folk. The ordi- 
nary normal healthy man understands what 
is meant by goodness; he becomes restive 
if we talk to him of righteousness. He 
understands what is meant by duty; he 
hardly listens if we talk to him of vocation. 
He understands us when we speak of moral 
depravity and regeneration and progress; 
he pays small heed to statements about sin 
and conversion and sanctification." The 
author's implied view is not merely that 
our language might be modernised, which 
may possibly be a good thing, but that the 
religion of healthy mindedness is practically 
to be taken as identical with the faith of 
redemption, and that the ideals which 
dominate the Birmingham business man 



26 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

only need a little furbishing to be seen 
to be fundamentally Christian. Nothing 
would seem to me more opposed to S. 
Paul's doctrine; nor would his language 
have seemed rational to Horace or Sue- 
tonius. Christianity conquered by its dif- 
ference from every other system. That is 
not to deny our duty of commending the 
faith by avoiding merely conventional or 
cant phrases, but of all heresies that of the 
religion of healthy mindedness seems to me 
to go the deepest. I quote the words as 
evidence of the existing condition, and also 
giving a succinct expression to the view 
against which these lectures are directed. If 
the world is to be brought back to Christ, it 
will not be by accepting its shibboleths and 
seeing God's revelation through eyes pur- 
blind with avarice or satisfied with the 
things of this world, but rather by dwelling 
on the strange new life He promises and 
re-awakening that sense of sin which has 
become unfashionable. A weightier wit- 
ness is that of the great philosopher Rudolph 
Eucken. In the Problem of Human Life 
he speaks of "the severity of the conflict 
with modern civilisation into which Chris- 



ARMAGEDDON 27 

tianity has fallen. In its rich unfolding of 
life the modern world has brought an untold 
wealth of things new and great, whose 
influence no one can escape and whose 
fruits we all enjoy. But with this incon- 
testable gain there is closely interwoven a 
characteristic tendency which is deeply in- 
volved in doubt and conflict. Since the 
beginning of the seventeenth century the 
modern world has wrought out a new type 
of life, which departs widely from the 
Christian. A powerful life-impulse forces 
the thinking and the activity of man more 
and more into the world which Christianity 
regarded as a lower one; in this world 
reason reigns, or wherever it is not yet 
present the labour of men seeks to create 
it; forces spring up ad infinitum, and the 
increase of power becomes the highest and 
all-sufficient goal of life. The greater the 
strength and self-consciousness which this 
new type acquires, the more evident it 
becomes that it is incompatible with, 
Christianity; in fact that the fundamental 
tendencies of the two run directly counter 
to each other. Their peaceable and friendly 
co-operation, such as existed in earlier times, 



28 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

becomes impossible; a clear understand- 
ing is increasingly necessary; continually 
harsher is the rejection of Christianity by 
those who follow the specifically modern 
tendency''' 1 

Equally strong is the statement in another 
work, Christianity and the New Idealism. 
"The main tendency of our own age, with 
its steadily growing spirit of independence, 
has come into even sharper conflict with 
Christianity. That it had a stronger 
vitality, and made existence more depend- 
ent on man's own activity, would not 
necessarily have conduced to this result. 
The irreparable breach was due to the fact 
that for modern thought the activity and 
the positive trend of life was conceived as 
man's own immediate work, as the out- 
come of his own natural strength; whereas 
Christianity regarded them as emanating 
from man's relation to God, through an 
inward renewal of his being; its affirmation 
of life is not direct, but is only reached 
through negation and inward change. We 
must beware of weakening in any way the 
opposition between the Christian and the 
modern points of view — an opposition so 



ARMAGEDDON 29 

strong as absolutely to preclude any pros- 
pect of easy reconciliation/' 8 

I quote these statements from a writer, 
who is very far from being a defender of 
ecclesiastical Christianity, as evidence that 
the conflict is not one on the surface or 
even about doctrine, but that it is a veri- 
table Armageddon between the spirit of 
Christ and that of antichrist. And indeed 
those writers grossly err who argue as 
though all wise men were agreed on the 
fundamentals, that it was only in the 
formularies fabricated by priests that diffi- 
culty existed. The attitude of such a 
writer as William Scott Palmer, in the 
Diary of a Modernist, that the Christian 
ideal may be taken for granted and Nietz- 
sche be ignored, may be true of certain 
coteries of culture, but it is profoundly false 
to the facts of life and ignores that deep 
and growing chasm which separates the 
aims of men. Speaking on the whole and 
dismissing the natural bias for counting 
on one's own side a majority, I should say 
that there are no longer grounds for believ- 
ing that the Western world is Christian 
now in a sense in which it was not in the 



30 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

period immediately preceding the peace of 
the Church under Constantine the Great. 
Of course Christian ideals still affect many 
who repudiate the Christian name, such as 
the Positivists. But does there seem much 
more ground for saying that we live in a 
Christian world, beyond what might have 
been said in the time of Tertullian? In 
many ways there is less ground. In a 
charming story of this country, Lady Balti- 
more? the writer makes his society people 
talk of having given up religion, as though 
it were a recognised fact that even nominal 
adhesion to it had ceased. Nor do the 
statistics of church-going in England favour 
a different view, while in Lutheran Ger- 
many or what w r as until recently Catholic 
France an even w^orse dry rot has set in. 
So far as we can judge, Spain, Italy, and 
Portugal are in like case, while in the last 
the government has embarked on a definite 
policy of persecution, and in many districts 
of France it is said that the municipality 
is refusing to repair the churches or even 
to permit Catholics to do so at their own 
charges. The atmosphere in literature and 
art, in novels and dramas, in newspapers 



ARMAGEDDON 31 

and reviews is not only no longer Christian, 
but is largely anti-Christian, even on the 
ethical side. If you think of some of the 
names most honoured of late, Thomas 
Hardy, George Meredith, Mr. Arnold Ben- 
nett, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H. G. Wells, 
or Mr. Henry James, however different 
they may be in outlook, none of them can 
be called Christian, while for some it seems 
impossible to name the subject without a 
sneer; and neither M. Anatole France nor 
Ibsen can control their dislike of a religion 
which is to them mere convention. If 
further you enquired of the most highly 
educated society in the West, whether it 
is specifically Christian, I think the answer 
is not doubtful. Would there be a very 
large proportion of such at any meeting of 
scholars or scientific men? Is there, in 
any real sense, at the Universities? Doubt- 
less the proportion would be better if you 
substituted the Almanack de Gotha for 
Minerva in your researches; for of those 
whose names are in the former, a majority 
would at least, for hereditary or social rea- 
sons, profess allegiance to the faith of their 
fathers. But frankly, even among the 



32 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

general public, whether you take as your 
standard the fortunate classes or the dis- 
inherited, it is only by very narrowly 
limiting your area that you can get even 
an appearance of any general adhesion to 
the ancient faith. I am not lamenting 
this condition. It is partly the natural 
fruit of liberty. With toleration ruling 
alike in practice and theory it is clear that 
many whose allegiance has been merely 
nominal will drop away, and in some cases 
hereditary influence is now on the other 
side; while in those who remain there is a 
growing intensity, which more than makes 
up for the lack of extension. 

Whether, however, we lament the fact or 
welcome it we must face it. So far as num- 
bers go, the Christian Church is no more 
than a section of the modern world, one 
among its many several developments. 
People dislike calling it a sect or a denomi- 
nation, but it can be nothing else, so long 
as there are large numbers who repudiate 
all part or lot in it and in many cases 
detest its ideals. Civilisation in its states- 
manship, its economic development, and 
more and more in its social and intellectual 



ARMAGEDDON 33 

life, goes on its way, not indeed unaffected 
by so great a tradition, yet largely inde- 
pendent of it. In fine, that secularisation of 
life which began with the Renaissance and 
was developed by the Reformation has now 
gone much farther. Religion has become 
almost entirely departmental, and it is more 
feasible than it once was to treat of the life 
and manners of the age apart from Chris- 
tianity, and to leave it out of account in 
estimating the lines of future development. 
One observer definitely states that religion 
may not be regarded as so much a private 
affair, but that we need not reckon on its 
influence in any general view of modern 
society. Mr. Masterman, in the Condition 
of England, 10 declares that "despite rallies, 
the process continues. It continues without 
violence, continuously, steadily as a kind of 
impersonal motion of secular change. It is 
the passing of a whole civilisation away from 
the faith in which it was founded and out 
of which it has been fashioned." Lord 
Haldane declares that "the dominant ideals 
of the average man of the middle class in 
Scotland appear to him to be a sort of mild 
agnosticism," n and from what I am told of 

4 



34 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

this country and Canada the only difference 
is that the schism between the Church and 
civilisation is greater than in the old world. 

And not only is the Church no longer the 
religion of civilisation, but she is met by 
many competing systems, and that even 
on her own hypothesis that mankind needs 
redemption. That is the point. They are 
so many. We live in an age of unparalleled 
anarchy both moral and intellectual. The 
confusion of tongues is worse than in any 
Babel of old. You have not exhausted the 
prospect by describing the Christian Church 
as only one among many competing agen- 
cies. Nor can you get rid of her claims by 
saying that she is the Church only of the 
uneducated. 

For what are the alternatives? In place 
of this body which has stood the test of 
experience, what is there offered to us? 
What system is accepted by those reflecting 
men of our day who deny the claims of the 
Church of Christ? Surely by this time 
we ought to have a clear answer if mere 
reasoning could avail; for the problem of 
life has been discussed by many acute 
minds. There ought to be some body of 



ARMAGEDDON 35 

philosophic doctrine, the possession of all 
educated men. Where is such a doctrine 
to be found? If we are to give up our life 
in a society, which has enshrined the 
essence of all that is highest in the religious 
experience of men, we ought at least to 
learn what we are giving it up for. Besides, 
if the exercise of our logical faculties were 
all-sufficient, since they are common to all 
men, we ought to know where we are by 
this time. But we don't. That is the 
long and the short of it. Outside the 
Church, men don't know where they are. 
On the one hand is the Church, still in 
possession, still taking from her treasure 
house things new and old, still consoling 
and converting men; she has history on 
her side and all the weight of tradition; 
there breathes in her temples the aroma 
of all the souls she has nourished and 
still nourishes, and on the other hand 
there is — what? Is there any other faith 
or fancy which holds among educated men 
anything like the predominant influence 
of rationalism in the eighteenth century? 
I grant you that the intellectual atmosphere 
we breathe is no longer Christian; that if 



36 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

I take up a volume of verse it is more than 
likely that it is the work of an infidel; that 
if I embark on a new philosopher (there 
are plenty of them) ten to one he despises 
the Christian faith so deeply that he has 
never been at the pains even to think what 
it means; that if I broach a scientific 
historian his attitude to the founder of 
Christianity will not improbably be one of 
a supercilious patronage. I admit that the 
pictures I see, the books I read, the music 
I hear, the plays I witness are largely 
the work of men outside the Church. All 
this on the negative side I grant. But 
what is there positive to set in its place? 
This question remains without reply. Scien- 
tific materialism is not held as a creed 
except by few, is commonly declared not 
to be one, although its presuppositions rule 
men's minds to a larger extent than they 
know. Beyond that all is chaos. Positivists, 
agnostics, idealists, pessimists, optimists, 
sceptics, theists, atheists jostle one another 
and nobody knows what his next-door 
neighbour thinks. And that even among re- 
flecting and cultivated men, who are above 
the mere vulgarities of money-making. 



ARMAGEDDON 37 

Twenty years ago one could not have 
said this. In those days the reply would 
have run as follows: "As to the vulgar, 
whether learned or ignorant, we neither 
know nor care. The only person entitled 
to a judgment is the trained philosopher, 
and from such the answer is not doubtful. 
All who do not write themselves down as 
incompetent are agreed upon some form of 
idealism. Their attitude to religion varies. 
Some are Christian and employ their philo- 
sophic doctrines as a prop to orthodoxy. 
Others are Christians with a difference and 
use their faith to purge tradition of its 
accretions. Others are theists and find in 
their system the one irrefragable refutation 
of materialism; others interpret the doc- 
trine in an atheist sense or in one purely 
sceptical. All, how 7 ever, are agreed that 
some form of the philosophy which was de- 
veloped by Hegel out of Kant is the only 
possible resting-place of thinking men. 
They differ from the master in many ways, 
or sometimes deny that they have one. 
But they claim that the doctrine they hold 
explicitly is implied in the faith of all; that 
it combines the certitude of science with 



38 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

the comfort of religion; that with the 
progress of education it will become a 
postulate of all culture. Whatever of the 
Christian creed may be harmonised with 
this system will endure; for these are the 
fundamental ideas of religion; the rest will 
vanish.' ' That or something like was the 
view present to humble enquirers not many 
years ago. 

In the words of one of its authorities, 12 
"For many years adherents of this way of 
thought have deeply interested the British 
public by their writings. Almost more 
important than their writings is the fact 
that they have occupied philosophical chairs 
in almost every University in the kingdom. 
Even the professional critics of idealism 
are for the most part idealists — after a 
fashion. ... It follows from their position 
of academic authority, were it from nothing 
else, that idealism exercises an influence, not 
easily measured, upon the youth of the 
nation — upon those, that is, who from the 
educational opportunities they enjoy may 
naturally be expected to become the leaders 
of the nation's thought and practice." Or 
as a hostile critic says, "For thirty years 



ARMAGEDDON 39 

or more English thought has been subject, 
not for the first time in its modern history, 
to powerful influences from abroad. The 
Rhine has flowed into the Thames, known 
locally as the Isis, and from the Isis the 
stream of German idealism has been dif- 
fused over the academical world of Great 
Britain/ 5 

It can hardly be questioned that this is 
a correct account of the philosophic ortho- 
doxy of the last generation, and perhaps 
it may still be called orthodoxy. But is 
it anything more? Is it dominant among 
students of philosophy in the same sense 
as it was? You know that it is not. Speak- 
ing in this place, which the memory of 
William James would alone suffice to render 
illustrious, if all its other voices were silent, 
I need not recall to you the philosophic 
movement of which he was a leader. 
Whether its trend is right or wrong, it is 
not relevant here to enquire. Enough 
for us that it exists, that it has won wide 
acceptance, and that it is in sharp an- 
tagonism with the whole anschauung 
which a little while ago seemed so well 
established. 



40 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

M. Bergson, too, has won a fame at 
least not inferior. Whatever his ultimate 
place in the history of thought, there is 
no doubt that he counts and will count 
more and more as time goes on. As one 
put it, "in future we may be pro-Bergso- 
nians or anti-Bergsonians, but we shall all 
be post-Bergsonians." 13 Things cannot be 
as though he had not written. Yet the 
whole argument of L 9 Evolution Creatrice 
and his other works is the direct antithesis 
of the maxim of Hegel, that the hidden 
secret of the universe must be penetrable 
to thought. Like the man or woman in 
the street, the lover, the soldier, the school- 
boy, Bergson would place instinct or intui- 
tion on a higher level in regard to our 
insight into reality than pure intelligence. 
He even goes so far as to pronounce the 
intellect incapable of comprehending life 
since it has been formed in the interests 
of practical activity and never penetrates 
beyond the outward aspect of things, and 
even that it exaggerates. 

If you go further and take up any philo- 
sophical journal you will find hints of other 
movements, all directed against orthodox 



ARMAGEDDON 41 

idealism. We have new realists like Mr. 
Bertrand Russell and Mr. G. E. Moore, and 
they are not alone, at least on the critical 
side. Writers like Mr. Prichard in his 
criticism of Kant 14 and Mr. Joseph are 
at variance with what has been the main 
tendency since Kant. 15 They are opposed 
to the view that the esse of things is 
percipi; while Mr. Galloway, writing from 
a somewhat different angle, declares that 
philosophy is moving towards some form 
of ideal-realism, or, in other words, is 
moving right away from the direction it 
took with the 'Copernican Revolution/ 16 
All these tendencies are significant, and 
the list is not exhaustive; Nietzsche is 
exercising a great influence, and no one, I 
suppose, would call him a successor of the 
apostles of modern philosophy. I note 
all these movements not in order to discuss 
them, but rather to point out that there is 
no such thing as philosophic authority at 
present, nor any likelihood of our reaching 
it; in other words, no body of principles 
to which all students adhere, as they do in 
the special sciences. There is no agree- 
ment among those who reflect on these 



42 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

topics, and so far then as experience goes, 
we have no ground for trusting that the un- 
illumined reflections of the human reason, 
revolving on itself, are bringing us to a 
knowledge of reality. I remember some 
years ago asking a trained philosopher 
whether he foresaw the prospect of any 
main general conclusions on the part of 
philosophers. He said No. At that time, 
more or less obsessed with the fashionable 
cult, I could hardly credit his words, but 
now I see what he meant. 

Thus, then, however you would account 
for it, it would seem a simple fact of obser- 
vation, that there is some "kink" in the 
human logic which prevents man arriving 
at the true knowledge of things by any 
exercise of his rational faculties alone, and 
that, though the power of drawing inferences 
is universal. So far as we can observe 
the history of these attempts, through its 
whole progress there is but one conclusion, 
and that is confirmed by the existing con- 
dition of thought. It may be summed up 
in the well known lines of Omar Khayyam: 



ARMAGEDDON 43 

"Up from earth's centre, through the seventh gate 
I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate; 

And many a knot unravelled by the road; 
But not the master-knot of human fate. 

"There was the Door to which I found no key; 
There was the veil through which I might not see: 

Some little talk awhile of me and thee 
There was — and then no more of Thee and Me. 

"Earth could not answer; nor the seas that mourn 
In flowing purple, of their lord forlorn; 

Nor rolling Heaven; with all His signs revealed 
And hidden by the sleeve of night and morn." 

However, it may be said that there is 
general agreement to adopt a purely agnos- 
tic standpoint. If we include the general 
level of educated and half -educated people, 
this would be nearer the truth. As a 
purely philosophic doctrine agnosticism is, 
of course, by no means incompatible with 
theistic or even Christian belief, and may 
make a very good basis for it. Instances 
of this are numerous; one of the most 
valuable is that of George Romanes, the 
great man of science. His work, Thoughts 
on Religion, illustrates the progress of the 
anima naturaliter Christiana from infidelity 
to the faith, through making his agnosti- 



44 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

cism "pure"; that is, purging it of pre- 
possessions on either side. For agnosticism 
need be no more than an assertion that 
the intellect of itself is incapable of em- 
bracing reality, with the corollary that all 
our knowledge of God is figurative and 
provisional. It may imply the belief that 
the idealist account of things is open to 
grave objection, and that all efforts of the 
mind un-illuminated by revelation lead to 
failure. This is very much the use put to 
it by Mr. Arthur Balfour, who in his 
Defence of Philosophic Doubt and the more 
popular Foundations of Belief has given 
us some admirable criticism both of the 
naturalist and the idealist accounts, of the 
world. It is obvious that with agnosticism 
so "pure" as this, there is no ground against 
— there may be very much reason for ac- 
cepting the Christian claim that our knowl- 
edge of God is mediated through His Son's 
manifestation in human life and can be 
reached in no other way. In this sense of 
the term, not only great moderns, such as 
"Newman" and "Pascal," but even the 
greater schoolmen, all alike maintain that 
the intellectual reason is not of itself ade- 



ARMAGEDDON 45 

quate, and that all our words and creeds 
are but metaphor; that our knowledge is, 
in a word, analogical. 

Agnosticism, however, as commonly used 
today, means more than this. It is a par- 
ticular kind of gnosticism. Its practical 
meaning is similar to naturalism; while 
theoretically it is a counsel of despair, 
which cannot be maintained by beings 
born to act. For they will not rest in the 
belief that reality is unknowable, alike to 
the reason and every other faculty of the 
soul, and that the world is all a maya of 
illusion. That is the one real hope in the 
West; men cannot in the last resort but 
believe in some reality; I might add that, 
even taking our life at its worst, it shews 
such desire for free personality, even if 
only for the few, that there is less danger 
than appears of its being satisfied with the 
opiates of Pantheism. At least we find 
as a fact that, apart from those immersed 
in immediate activity, reflecting men hold 
less and less to a truly agnostic position. 
It always tends to pass into its opposite 
and to become a gnosticism, whether theistic 
or the reverse. Herbert Spencer's own 



46 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

system has been called semi-theism, and 
he told us in his autobiography that as he 
grew older he became less hostile to insti- 
tutional religion. Sidgwick's agnosticism 
verged on theistic faith, just as in others 
it is tantamount to atheism. A better 
instance is that of Mr. Lowes Dickinson. 
Contemptuous as he is of all Christian 
ideals, yet in his books on "Religion" he 
develops a doctrine which may call itself 
agnosticism, but is in reality a sort of 
theism; and this is even more the case with 
the dialogue on the Meaning of Good. 

Of agnosticism, in the popular sense, 
the strength has been and is not philosophic 
thinking, but the prejudice from natural 
science, the refusal of men like Huxley to 
discern any ground for a spirit world beyond. 
Even this attitude is changing. Science 
tends more and more to recognise its pro- 
visional and purely descriptive character; 
further it is being driven to credit as 
phenomena facts which make for a view 
of the world as spiritual and personal, and 
destroy the hope that, with a little more 
knowledge, the universe could be summed 
up in a series of differential equations; be- 



ARMAGEDDON 47 

cause all history has been fixed from the 
outset, and at any moment the state of 
the world might be mathematically deduced 
from that just preceding. This fatalism is 
the one and only postulate irreconcilable 
with the Christian faith. 

" With earth's first clay thou didst the last man knead, 
And then of the last harvest sow'd the seed: 

Yea the first morning of Creation wrote 
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read." 

Were this indeed the case, and it is the 
assumption of all who disbelieve the mirac- 
ulous, we need not discuss the Christian 
faith, or indeed any other, which appeals 
to spiritual freedom and treats the future 
as not determined. Such a faith in that 
case could have no meaning, neither would 
human life, as we see and live it from day 
to day. This prejudice, however, is break- 
ing against the rock of fact. Natural 
science is becoming in the true sense agnos- 
tic, and recognises that it can speak but 
of phenomena and their relations; of what 
is behind it has no word to say, one way or 
the other. In so far as observation in- 
creases our sense of the cruelty of nature, 
it may increase the difficulty of believing 



48 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

in the Fatherhood of God. Probably the 
supreme difficulty of theistic religion to 
most minds does lie in this doctrine rather 
more than in any of the other points. But 
I do not know that this has been substan- 
tially increased since the days when Tenny- 
son made it classical in his indictment of 
Nature "red in tooth and claw with ravin," 
and Mill 17 developed the same thesis in prose. 
More and more, too, is science tending 
to lay stress on the unique, the individual; 
and more and more does that tend to remove 
the antecedent objection to the Christian 
revelation. And it cannot be too often 
repeated that it is the antecedent objection 
which weighs with most minds and is at 
the bottom of three quarters of the destruc- 
tive criticism. Dr. Karl Pearson's criti- 
cism of the Law of Causation in the recent 
edition of his Grammar of Science ought to 
leave no doubt that those who are deterred 
from admitting the force of the evidence 
of the uniqueness of the events connected 
with the life of Jesus, because they seem 
at variance with some imaginary law, are 
merely frightened by a bogie. "As far 
as our own experience goes, nothing in the 



ARMAGEDDON 49 

universe ever will exactly repeat itself; 

the law of causation is a useful 

conception, but in no sense a reality lying 
as a bed rock below phenomena." 18 

But this is not all. The uprising of 
psychology is teaching us many things. 
Admitted facts like those of thought trans- 
ference and the whole doctrine of the sub- 
liminal self serve to shew that our personal 
life reaches deeper than we suppose, and 
give us hints of a universe whose elements 
connect themselves in a way that is incom- 
patible with a materialistic hypothesis. 
Mr. Gerald Balfour has recently shewn this 
to be the case in regard to the admitted 
cases of telepathy, quite apart from the 
more doubtful alleged cases of "cross- 
correspondence." Dr. Jevons has further 
developed the point that the facts of mind- 
cure are not explained by giving them a 
name, and that they remain unintelligible 
except on a spiritual theory. 

The new developments in regard to a 
theory of matter, while they certainly do 
not make religious belief more difficult, serve 
on the one hand to favour the view that we 
know very little about the constitution of 



50 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

the material world, while all recent research 
tends to shew us the depth of mystery that 
surrounds the subject and the highly specu- 
lative character of most theories in regard 
to its nature. 

From all these sides, the descriptive nature 
of science, the electronic theory of matter, 
the admitted emphasis on the unique and 
individual, the strange occurrences now 
known to the psychologist, men are slowly 
moving away from that view which makes 
the facts of Gospel appear incredible because 
they seem to conflict with certain so-called 
laws, which are never more than observed 
uniformities and might always be subject 
to exceptions. 

As M. Bergson says, we cannot lay down 
a priori the impossibility of any fact. 
Indeed, in regard to the Gospel facts, it is 
not scientific men, but "liberal" theologians 
who take their science at second hand, who 
tell us that the stories of the Virgin Birth 
and the Resurrection body are certainly 
false. Huxley, for instance, professed him- 
self quite ready to believe it, if he had 
thought the evidence sufficient. It is 
critics like Dr. Kirsopp Lake, or philoso- 



ARMAGEDDON 51 

phers like Dr. Rashdall, who say before- 
hand that the one or the other is plainly 
impossible. 

Thus the prevailing uncertainty in regard 
to fundamental principles weakens the 
force of any and all the systems which 
compete with the Christian Church, while 
the recent advances in scientific thought 
have lessened the current objections. For 
all that, the great obstacle to belief among 
ordinary minds is the success of physical 
science; the achievements in the practical 
world that have issued from a method of 
enquiry which postulates a uniformity 
against which the Christian story and our 
sense of freedom are alike in conflict. We 
are learning that even in the simplest 
facts there is ever a mystery at the last, 
a point at which you can only say, "Things 
are so/' "Blue is blue, and there's an end 
of it." As men see this and as they see 
also the mysteries involved in the scientific 
projection of the world, and concentrate 
attention on the actual facts of freedom 
and the realm of values, and as they fur- 
ther see the connection between the postu- 
lates of human freedom and those of the 



52 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

miraculous or the Divine freedom; so will 
the mirage of natural uniformity vanish, 
like the dream it is, and they will be able 
to place themselves before the light, that 
shone once over Bethlehem, and yield to 
the great weight of evidence that points to 
the invasion of this world by powers from 
one beyond. 

Apart from the Christian hope, we are 
in a state of chaos, only the more appalling 
that it seems to be hardly realised. The 
chaos is all the greater that it applies not 
only to fundamental doctrines, but to 
practical ideals. For the anarchy of specu- 
lative thought is almost a harmony com- 
pared with the chaos of the moral ideals. 

In the last century the world could still 
retain Christian ideals, while giving up 
that life in the Church which alone makes 
them possible. That belief has been shat- 
tered by facts, and writers of the older 
school of rationalists, like Goldwin Smith, 
noted and lamented this. Here and there 
you find a belated Positivist or an austere 
agnostic holding to an ideal indistinguish- 
able from the Christian, but for the most 
part the non-Christian no longer even 



ARMAGEDDON 53 

affects to take Jesus as Master, but opposes, 
with more or less of contempt for the 
founder, the whole system of Christian 
morals. I will not dwell on the great 
movement of which Friedrich Nietzsche 
was the mouthpiece, although I believe it 
to be significant. Its glorification of pride, 
its philosophy of cruelty and race antago- 
nism are a shining expression of the spirit 
of antichrist and of the practical ideals of 
many men who would be shocked at the 
language of Nietzsche. It is fair to say 
that part of Nietzsche's individualism had 
its origin in a wholesome reaction against 
the pessimistic ethical socialism, derived 
from Schopenhauer or the East, which 
preaches altruism not because of the worth 
of, but because of the (alleged) unreality 
of the individual. Also from Nietzsche's 
polemic against arid intellectualism there 
is much to be learnt, and from his general 
romantic attitude. At the same time his 
whole contempt, not merely of the Christian 
creed, but of Christian ethics, is undoubted 
and cannot be lost sight of. Moreover it is, 
in this respect, as incarnating a new philos- 
ophy of pride and reviving ideas essentially 



54 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Pagan that he has his greatest vogue — 
and it is in this respect that his disciples 
would claim to be "immoralists," as 
opposed to the whole notion of ethics which 
has prevailed for two thousand years. 
This is discerned to be the true inwardness 
of the conflict between the ethics of Chris- 
tianity and Nietzsche by a writer in a recent 
number of the Hibbert Journal, Professor 
Otto Julius Bierbaum, 19 in an interesting 
article on Dostoievsky and Nietzsche, from 
which I make some extracts. It is indeed 
the strongest presumption in favour of the 
Divine and other-worldly character of the 
Gospel that it should be seen to be dia- 
metrically opposed in outlook, in motive, 
and practical maxims to a scheme of things 
avowedly Pagan, self-regarding, and this- 
worldly. "I speak from the standpoint of 
"one to whom Nietzsche's doctrine of the 
" transvaluation of all values is something 
u more than an empty phrase, and I assume 
"that it indicates the direction in which the 
" most potent forces of Western culture are 
"moving today. . . . 

"Even if it be conceded that the spirit 
"informing him is, for Russia, fit and salu- 



ARMAGEDDON 55 

"tary, it does not follow that it is the same 
"for us. We to whom Dostoievsky remains 
"at bottom a stranger are not born to absorb it; 
"to attempt this would be to deny Goethe and 
"to regard Nietzsche as a disease. It is a 
"divergent path that we are called to tread. 
"Our wanderings in the Catacombs are over. 

"Those by whom this doctrine is rejected 
" (as it may be by men of great intellectual 
"power) should welcome Dostoieffsky at 
"once as a kindred spirit; for in him Christ 
"speaks, and we must go back very far in 
"the history of the Christian faith to find 
"one in whom he speaks so forcibly as here. 
"I for one should need to go back to S. 
"Francis of Assisi. . . . 

"On the one hand we have Nietzsche 
"breaking in his Zarathustra the tables of 
"the Mosaic Law; on the other Dostoieffsky 
"raising up out of the depths of his Russian 
"heart the primitive Christ." 

If you take other non-Christian teachers, 
like Mr. Lowes Dickinson, it is easy to see 
how entirely they repudiate the Christian 
ethic. An Oxford tutor, in his Religion of all 
Good Men, while personally doing homage 
to the teaching of Jesus, declares the whole 



56 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

system to be obsolete, and would sub- 
stitute the " Gothic' ' ideal, as he calls 
chivalry — the ethical simplification of 
"gentlemanly conduct." 20 Mr. H. G. 
Wells, in his impressive study, First and 
Last Things, has told us that the per- 
sonality of Jesus does not appeal to him; 
while of the book which has united Chris- 
tians of every obedience, another teacher 
from Oxford, Mr. Henry Sturt, 21 writes 
in the following elegant terms: "Of all the 
terrible intellectual disasters of Europe 
the Bible has been by far the greatest, 
mitigated only partially by the wild ro- 
mantic savagery of the Old Testament, 
by the sweet natural beauty of the preach- 
ing of Jesus, and, for us, by the old-time 
nobility of our Jacobean translation. What 
an irreparable injury to the intellectual 
growth of England that week by week, 
for centuries, the people have had pre- 
sented to them 'lessons' from the records 
of an Arabian tribe unapproachably distant 
in culture, in national sentiment, and in. 
spiritual aspirations. Who can estimate 
the degree to which our poetry has been 
stunted and starved, our national genius 



ARMAGEDDON 57 

crushed, our history cheapened and thrust 
out of sight by this alien oppression? 
Scholars have sentimentalised over the 
desolation of Hellas by the coarse, ignorant 
tyranny of the Turks. Have they ever 
thought of the ruin these ill-starred Jewish 
scriptures have wrought to the mind of the 
Teutonic nations?" It is not as though 
there was any compensating agreement 
about the fundamentals of morals. Chris- 
tian chastity is condemned; Mr. Bernard 
Shaw would make divorce "as cheap, as 
easy, and as secret as possible"; a great 
novelist was for treating marriage as on 
the system of a leasehold contract, termi- 
nable at intervals, while reputable names 
can be found defending vices which even 
the Pagans condemned, and a recent his- 
torical writer has set up Heliogabalus with 
all his nameless vices as a mark of modern 
admiration. 22 Of course many would hold 
to an austere view of morals quite apart 
from religion; others would recommend 
no more than "manly" liberality. But 
whatever they may approve, they are at 
variance with the Christian notion of 
marriage, and our novels and plays and 



58 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

popular agitations bear witness to a chaos 
in moral ideals. This hopeless floundering 
in all men's notions of right and wrong may 
be partly due to the strange complexities 
of our day, but it is more often the result 
of the breaking down of all barriers to the 
individual caprice and of the preaching of 
a doctrine of "living one's own life," which 
leaves a man or woman — for the evil is 
largely there — with no stars in heaven to 
steer by. For "God hath made man up- 
right, but he hath found out many inven- 
tions." A society which leaves God out 
of the reckoning in all matters of family 
and sexual intercourse is bound direct for 
the rocks. At this moment indeed it is 
the ethic of Christianity which is more 
unpopular than the creed. It hinders the 
free development of the individual in regard 
to society, or it is disliked as ascetic 
and unnatural in regard to the private life; 
and in business relations it is rejected on 
principle as mere sentimentalism. 

This is all very natural. The firmest 
believer in Christ finds his ideal so far be- 
yond his practice that it is very unlikely 
that an unbeliever should retain a thing 



ARMAGEDDON 59 

so difficult; while the balance between 
egoism and altruism is so hard to strike 
in theory that the Christian Church is the 
only society in which a fair mean can be 
had, and apart from life therein we should 
anticipate what we actually have, an oscil- 
lation between capricious individualism, or 
an altruism no less irrational. 

So far as we Christians are concerned, 
it is the ethical antagonism which is the 
more important. Nietzsche with his in- 
sight saw that here was the crux. So long 
as men go on admiring Jesus and making 
Him their ideal, no good will come from 
disproving the Gospel history. Somehow 
or other men will hold to a system funda- 
mentally Christian and will adopt practi- 
cally, if not theoretically, an attitude of 
worship. They will act in a way which 
logically implies the system which in theory 
they have rejected. If they are finally to 
be cut loose from the Christian Church, 
they must be taught to trample on the 
Christian ideal. And so Nietzsche set 
himself to develop the taunt of the rejecting 
Jews at our Lord, "He hath a devil." 
Since many men, as a fact, live an anti- 



60 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Christian life, he only drew out what was 
implied therein. That is one reason of his 
influence. He made an idol of the deeds 
of "bloodthirsty and cruel men." 

Perhaps I may seem to exaggerate the 
chaos of existing beliefs. Rather I believe 
that I underrate it. So far as concerns 
that world called educated or specifically 
modern, the anarchy is greater, not less, 
than I portray. The fact is disguised from 
us by the presence amongst us of classes 
who cling by instinct to the old faith. 
What I am thinking of is the seething 
cauldron of this modern world, not those 
who, whether by fortune or choice, live in 
a backwater. Barchesters still exist, but 
we do not live there. In the world where 
we do live, every kind of current and cross- 
current is flowing at this moment, or as 
one man put it, "the pavement is up in all 
directions"; "for in those days there was 
no king in Israel and every man did that 
which was right in his own eyes." 

I have been trying to shew that, while 
as a fact the intellectual atmosphere of our 
day is unfavourable to the Christian Church, 



ARMAGEDDON 61 

yet this is merely a fact, the result of one- 
sided development. It is no more decisive 
than was the prejudice of the philosophic 
schools of Rome or Alexandria in the first 
century. The modern prejudice has been 
created by the predominance of a single 
method, triumphant in its own sphere, and 
the attempt to carry it into regions where 
it is powerless. This method has unduly 
influenced certain critics and historians, 
who have taken their science for granted; 
unaware of the reserves made by the 
greater physicists, they have treated as 
rigid laws what are mere facts of normal 
happening and have started to reconstruct 
the New Testament or the history of the 
Christian Church, with certain classes of 
events ruled out a priori as incredible. 
The same prejudices have operated to the 
detriment of history, by creating a bias 
in favour of arranging it all on a schematic 
basis as the result of inevitable laws, 
omitting all but a meagre reference to the 
vast changes wrought by persons; that is, 
by spiritual beings. 

From many sides, however, these views 
have been attacked. The limits of intel- 



62 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

lectual reasoning have been analysed by 
writers like Bergson, certainly not from 
any bias towards the Christian Faith. 
There is no longer a united front or anything 
like it on the part of the non-Christian 
world. It is as variegated as the religions 
of Asia. We are in the midst of Armaged- 
don; we may keep the faith, but we must 
fight for it. Sir Oliver Lodge is but one 
of many scientific men who bid us remember 
the limitations of all purely mechanical 
interpretations 23 ; while another scientific 
observer, Dr. McDougall, has just pub- 
lished a volume, Mind and Soul, designed 
to resuscitate once more the old-fashioned 
belief in the individual soul which some had 
told us had vanished forever from the world 
of "enlightenment." 

Neither in fundamental matters of 
thought, nor in ideals of practice, is there 
any body of principles accepted in the 
main by reflecting men or any probability 
of such arising. On the contrary we live 
amid a greater intellectual and moral chaos 
than has ever been known in history. This 
cannot continue. 24 A civilisation to endure 
will have to mean something, and "projected 



ARMAGEDDON 63 

efficiency " will not satisfy any race which 
considers its latter end. Against the disso- 
lution which is otherwise in store for us, 
there is nothing to stand but the life of the 
Christian Church. The existing anarchy 
renders it not less but more probable that 
there alone can the needs of human nature 
be satisfied. Hostility indeed is open and 
contemptuous, yet there is nothing to 
inhibit our faith. The Apollyons of modern 
knowledge are only bogies. Neither from 
the side of natural science, nor from phi- 
losophy, nor from ethics is there any voice 
so clear or authoritative as to bear any 
weight beyond an individual appeal; while 
there is nothing proved, no principle even 
probable, which stands in the way of 
Christian Faith. There is no a priori 
obstacle to the faith, provided that it seem 
on other grounds to be reasonable. Such 
grounds are to be found in the New Testa- 
ment experience, as solid with the life of 
the Church and the inward witness of the 
believer. For there she is, the Christian 
Church seared with the sins of all the cen- 
turies, bearing the memory not only of the 
saints, a Saint Francis, a Father Damien, a 



64 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Fenelon, a Bishop Brent, but also of the 
Renaissance Popes, the eighteenth century 
prelates, the persecutors, the time-servers; 
still she goes on. Here in our midst is the 
society, which claims to have the gathered 
experience of the race, still to keep the 
flame burning, no philosopher's dream or 
far-off hope, but a life with the scars no 
less than the strength of reality; still she 
comes before us and asks, Can you do with- 
out me? Is this glad new life for which 
all seek to be had within me, or must men 
seek it elsewhere? " Art thou He that 
should come or do we look for another ?" 25 



LECTURE II 
BABYLON OR THE MORAL CRISIS 

The Post-Impressionists have lately been 
the theme of much talk. We are not here 
to canvass the artistic merit of this strange 
new school of painting. But the move- 
ment means a good deal. By authorities 
like Mr. Roger Fry and Mr. C. J. Holmes 
we have learnt something of its aims. We 
are shewn how it witnesses partly to that 
Oriental influence which has been pouring 
in upon Western art ever since Japan was 
discovered, and partly to that cult of the 
primitive which has been growing every 
year. Here is a deliberate effort to step 
back into the child's view of the natural 
world and to thrust away the lie of the 
photographic artist, which, rendering every 
detail, obscures the whole truth and sacri- 
fices colour and line to what is at bottom 
mere mechanism. It represents a desire 

6 65 



66 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

to get away from our sophisticated world 
to one simpler. No longer shall the artist 
be controlled by the desire of accurate 
presentation of detail; rather by sugges- 
tion and subtle arrangement shall he call 
up those impressions fitting avowedly the 
scene, and wed his own imagination to that 
of the spectator. Mr. Roger Fry, in an 
illuminating article, describes the signifi- 
cance of the movement as follows: 

"Again and again have attempts been 
made by artists to regain this freedom of 
imaginative appeal, but the attempts have 
been hitherto tainted by archaism. Now 
at last artists can use with perfect sincerity 
means of expression which have been denied 
them ever since the Renaissance. And this 
is no isolated phenomenon confined to the 
little world of professional painters; it is 
one of many expressions of a great change 
in our attitude to life. We have passed 
in our generation through what looks like 
the crest of a long progression in human 
thought, one in which the scientific or 
mechanical view of the universe was ex- 
ploited for all its possibilities. How vast 
and on the whole how desirable those possi- 



BABYLON 67 

bilities are is undeniable, but this effort 
has tended to blind our eyes to other 
realities — the realities of our spiritual 
nature and the justice of our demand for 
its gratification. Art has suffered in this 
process, since art, like religion, appeals to 
the non-mechanical parts of our nature, 
to what in us is mystic and vital. It seems 
to me, therefore, impossible to exaggerate 
the importance of this movement in art, 
which is destined to make the sculptors' and 
painters' endeavour once more contermi- 
nous with the whole range of human aspi- 
ration and desire." 

I am not asking how far these men are 
right or wrong; the point is that they exist. 
Here in one important sphere, with interests 
quite other than religious, men are seen in 
deliberate revolt against the mental habit 
of the Western world, as it has developed 
itself since the Renaissance. Elsewhere 
we can also trace a similar sense of its 
limitation. It is deliberately controverted 
by an architectural genius like Mr. R. A. 
Cram, 1 whom I need not in this place do 
more than mention. In the Irish literary 
movement, in the verse and criticism of 



68 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Mr. W. B. Yeats, in the plays of Lady 
Gregory, above all in dramas like Synge's 
Riders of the Sea and The Play Boy of the 
Western World, the same spirit manifests 
itself, and it finds conscious expression, in 
regard to language in the latter's preface. 
There he points out the evil that has been 
done to the rich suggestiveness and sym- 
bolism, in other words the "sacramental" 
element in language, by the whole modern 
mechanical method, which uses words like 
the symbols of a typewriter. We can see 
the tendency far back in "Tiger, tiger 
burning bright" and the whole anschauung 
of William Blake, and much that has been 
written about the "Renascence of Wonder" 
bears on it. All these movements start 
from the assumption that the calculable, 
mechanical aspects of life have been given 
undue prominence in the West and that 
poetic, if not ethical, salvation is to be 
found by leaving it; in a word we are to 
"repent and become as little children" 
in the service of beauty, no less than in 
that of God. For of course those move- 
ments have nothing directly to do with the 
Christian Faith. Their protagonists are 



BABYLON 69 

often its bitterest opponents. Yet all are 
fighting the same battle with the vulgarities 
and mechanical categories of commercialised 
Europe; all are on the side of spirit and 
freedom against Philistinism and mammon 
worship. All in a sense are other-worldly 
and despise the tokens of the day; all, if 
triumphant, will lead to a " transvaluation 
of all values." People may be spiritually 
akin, without knowing it or liking to 
acknowledge the fact when they are told. 
As was said by one of them: 

"For thou art gone away from earth, 
And place with those dost claim, 
The children of the Second Birth, 
Whom the world could not tame; 

"And with that small transfigured band 
Whom many a different way 
Conducted to this common land, 
Thou learn'st to think, as they. 

"Christian or Pagan, King and slave, 
Soldier and Anchorite, 
Distinctions we esteem so grave, 
Are nothing in their sight. 

"They do not ask, who pined unseen, 
Who was on action hurled 
Whose one bond is, that all have been 
Unspotted by the world." 2 



70 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

All these things, like the romantic move- 
ment in the early nineteenth century, are 
evidences of a change of spirit which in- 
cludes a religious aspect, but is in reality 
wider. Our Lord's bidding to His friends 
to take no thought of the morrow, to be 
like children, and to consider the lilies 
and to copy the birds, is curiously akin 
to this latest utterance of a technique that 
has swung full circle; only it reaches 
further. Christianity is not less, but ten 
thousand times more revolutionary than 
people think. That jaded middle-aged so- 
ciety of the Pagan Empire did well to see 
in the Church its foe, and to persecute a 
living spirit with the gift of Eternal youth. 
Some tell us now that Jesus proclaimed a 
social gospel. So He did. But it was 
not that of Karl Marx or Henry George 
or any legislator. He came to upset the 
whole scale of values, and by changing men's 
desires to inaugurate a new epoch. At this 
moment there would be few wrongs in the 
distribution of wealth if people ceased to 
want more than is good for them. Jesus came 
to alter men's wants. The real economic 
reformer is not the man who alters the laws, 



BABYLON 71 

but he who changes the wants of a suffi- 
ciently large number of people to affect the 
markets. Consider how great a reformer 
was Peter the Hermit. He made more 
difference than many legislators. So does 
any effective preacher of standards above 
the common. There would be fewer harlots 
if the great majority of men even tried to 
live pure lives; while the appalling inequali- 
ties of our day would vanish as by magic if 
a sufficient number of men were to leave off 
"making haste to be rich" and a sufficient 
number of women were to "set their affec- 
tions on things above. 55 The world improves 
slowly, because nearly everyone overvalues 
material goods. That is the main cause 
of unjust laws, of economic wrong, and 
nearly all tyranny — not the only cause, 
but in our day the chief one, except sheer 
stupidity. Any change of men's ideals in 
this respect would at once lead to improve- 
ment. 

As I said in the first lecture, the world 
of the Middle Ages was anything but an 
ideal place, and those best off were with- 
out our comforts. It was a rough and 
cruel world of tumbling, quarrelsome, 



72 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

naughty, joyous, and rather dirty children. 
Its tears and its laughter, its hopes and 
its solemnities, still live, not only in our 
chroniclers or poets, but more universally 
in those majestic piles, which not even the 
throned scoundrel who destroyed the Abbeys 
could quite avail to shatter. These places 
witness to two things — men's faith alike 
in God and in man. The two go together. 
Either the whole world, seen no less than 
unseen, is conceived as personal, spiritual, 
alive, ever fresh so that 

"New every morning is the Love 
Our wakening and uprising prove"; 

or else it is seen as mechanical, impersonal, 
dead, with human history unrolling itself, 
like a cinematograph. The one is the 
world of Catholic Christianity, the other 
that of Pagan philosophy or scientific 
fatalism and its more spiritual or at least 
decorative variety — Pantheism. 

It is not doubtful that, if we were asked 
to name a material symbol of the Middle 
Ages, we should point to Rouen Cathedral 
or Durham or to some great monastery 
church, like Westminster or Selby or Peter- 



BABYLON 73 

borough. To many who know nothing else 
about those days, these form the only 
conscious link, the one legacy of the past. 
As John Ruskin said in words which those 
who have once read them find it hard to 
forget: 

"They are the only witnesses perhaps 
that remain to us of the faith and fear of 
nations. All else for which the builders 
sacrificed has passed away — all their living 
interests and aims and achievements. We 
know not for what they laboured, and we 
see no evidence of their reward. Victory, 
wealth, authority, happiness — all have 
departed, though bought by many a bitter 
sacrifice. But of them and their fife and 
their toil upon the earth, one reward, one 
evidence is left us in these grey heaps of 
deep-wrought stone. They have taken with 
them to the grave their powers, their hon- 
ours, and their errors; but they have left 
us their adoration." 3 

There were, of course, many other sides 
to medieval life. Then, as now, greed and 
cruelty and lust claimed their victims. But 
its distinctive note is the effort to treat all 
human actions from the standpoint of the 



74 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

other world. That was its standard of 
value. Its unity is the unity of a band of 
pilgrims struggling hardly home; its tender- 
ness and intimacy are the smiling tears of 
a soul that is glad by a great forgiveness; 
its humour is the wholesome universal play 
of those who are untroubled by all the 
storms and undismayed by bereavement, 
because they know that a man may feel 
that: 

"Love is and was my king and lord 
And shall be though as yet I keep 
Within his courts on earth and sleep 
Encompassed by his faithful guard, 

"And here at times the sentinel, 

That moves about from place to place 
And whispers through the worlds of space 
In the deep night that all is well." 

Even the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire 
was the grandest ideal that men have set 
before them in statecraft, and though it 
was broken up under the passion and the 
pride of man, we need not suppose that the 
vast unity of all human and divine affairs 
as seen in the vision of Dante is a thing to 
be despised by a different age. 

For it is different. Let us not forget 






BABYLON 75 

that. The statecraft, the economics, the 
education, the literature, the social and 
family life of our day are organised on a 
basis frankly secular. So far as these 
things are concerned, we might almost say 
that God does not count. Consequently 
it is the symbols of material possession that 
are alone striking in the world of today. 
For that very reason there is less of monu- 
mental expression, for men intent on money- 
making erect buildings only for utilitarian 
ends. If, however, any one such thing 
could represent our world of today to 
Macaulay's New Zealander I suppose it 
would be the Stock Exchange. That is the 
true centre of the interests of the vast 
majority today, excepting small groups 
apart from the main current. To many 
others it would be the factory or the 
mill. 

To that end its universities and all its 
education is more and more being directed. 
Attacks of daily increasing virulence are 
made directly on those studies which do 
not lead directly to money-getting. Not 
long since some business men went to the 
Vice-Chancellor of a certain University 



76 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

and asked him to guarantee that if they 
sent their sons to take a certain course 
on commercial topics they would become 
wealthy men. Physical science is indeed 
valued, but mainly because it is hoped to in- 
crease the chances of money-making. Take 
the Western world through, and what unity 
can you find either in religion or thought 
or practical ideals except the desire for 
riches? I think I am not exaggerating. 

Some one said to me here the other day, 
"You cannot imagine the degree to which 
we are materialized; every servant girl 
cherishes hopes of being one day a society 
queen." Of course the love of money is 
not new, but the absorption in it of seventy- 
five per cent of human energy is, I think, 
new. More and more people are ill-con- 
tent with a competence and are snatching 
at the means of ostentation. What has 
been euphemistically called the democrati- 
sation of society has meant in practice the 
crushing out of all standards save that of 
wealth, so that people openly boast that 
"they judge a man by his balance at the 
bank"; and many more do so while hardly 
aware of it. I heard a woman of historic 



BABYLON 77 

name, dwelling in a way that might seem 
beyond the dreams of avarice, declare 
that she had asked her agent, "Oh when 
shall I be rich, Mr. Smith?" Every form 
of luxury has increased, with the result that 
those who have enough are always, like 
Oliver Twist, "asking for more," while so 
many people are living beyond their income 
that the need of money is breaking down 
still further the barriers of honour and 
fair-dealing. It is the mad race for wealth 
that is the real cause of men's dislike of 
religion. For Christianity can in no way 
be got to fit with such a scheme of life, and 
hence it is left out. Driven by this whip, 
men are abandoning all scruple, and meth- 
ods grow daily in favour, which even half a 
century ago would have seemed less than 
honest. "The great god success" is de- 
scribed in an American novel as the one 
goal on which all are agreed, and some one 
said to me the other day, when I demurred, 
to his admiration of a set of people, that 
they were scoundrels, "Ah, yes, but they 
get there." This aim, whether you call it 
avarice, or the love of power, or the pas- 
sion for conquest, has always dominated 



78 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

many. But it has not always been wor- 
shipped without reserve. Since the days 
of that majestic embodiment of human 
pride, the Roman Empire, when S. John 
bewailed "the lust of the flesh, and the 
lust of the eyes and the pride of life," 
material standards have never ruled with 
such general acquiescence, as they do now. 
The Middle Ages had "their forestallers 
and regraters," but they did not call them 
"kings of finance." Even a Renaissance 
despot, though he embodied a similar ideal, 
had commonly either political genius or 
artistic culture. If men did not copy, at 
least they canonized S. Francis. Nowa- 
days the police would lock him up for 
sleeping in the open. 

However, it is hard to say anything on 
this topic without becoming either com- 
monplace or exaggerated. Let me leave 
it with one illustration. 

There died last year a sovereign who, 
though not a great statesman, has left 
behind him a memory that will not die. 
Leopold, king of the Belgians, had many of 
the gifts of the Emperor Nero, without 
his artistic taste. To the powers of the 



BABYLON 79 

efficient man of business he added habits 
in moral matters which were overacted 
rather than novel; while his notions of 
family affection might have been learned 
at the court of Herod the Great. He 
developed the resources of his people (in- 
cluding the casino of Ostend). At length 
he persuaded the states of the West to 
unite in a scheme w T hich should carry to 
a backward race the blessings of civilised 
existence. What those blessings are can 
be found in many official documents or 
pictured for the casual reader by Stack- 
pole's Pools of Silence. Recently I received 
an invitation to invest money in some 
Congo rubber company on the ground that 
"the sensational fortune of King Leopold 
had a meaning." It had. His decease, 
so lamentable to that race to whom in his 
own words he was teaching "the sanctity 
of labour," was discussed at some length 
by the press of that city, which has ever 
regarded itself as the metropolis of modern 
culture. They praised the dead monarch 
and enlarged on his abilities, apparently 
regarding as one ground of their admiration 
his admitted lack of scruple. All this I 



80 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

quote, not because I wish to add one more 
curse to one who hears already the cries 
of a murdered people, but because it illus- 
trates the spirit of modern civilisation with 
little infusion from earlier influences. The 
combination of greed, lust, and success, 
this is what moves the reverence of the 
Parisian journalists in the year of our Lord 
1910; this is the ideal held up to the enter- 
prising citizens — who are not princes. Is it 
for this and such like examples that we are 
invited to treat the Bible as pernicious, 
or gird at the epileptic ecstacies of S. 
Paul? For remember that King Leopold 
did not differ, except in fortune, from many 
unknown makers of millions and many 
more who would like to make them. It 
was not that his morals were worse, but 
that his success was greater, not that his 
aims were low, but that his place was high, 
that won for him a renown so fragrant. 
Every man or woman who invests money 
with the single aim of dividends, irrespec- 
tive of means, is guilty potentially of the 
same crimes. In a debate before the 
introduction of Chinese labour, one mem- 
ber of Parliament declared that there was 



BABYLON 81 

one paramount need, that of getting gold 
out of the Rand. The moment such a 
spirit rules, the horrors of the Congo are 
bound to arise, given the conditions. In- 
deed, if accounts be trustworthy, the same 
is true of places like the Valle Nacional of 
Mexico and of many systems of so-called 
peonage; just as it was true in the factory 
system of England before child labour was 
regulated, in spite of a chorus of shrieks on 
the part of the rich manufacturers, led by 
John Bright. None of these things could 
go on were it not for the morbid lust of 
men to secure the utmost material gain at 
the lowest cost and to set aside every 
consideration of the workers' interests. 
For the evil does not lie in the forced labour, 
nor in the tutelage of the child races (both 
probably necessary), but comes from thrust- 
ing out all consideration for the labourer, 
as a person, and treating him as a living 
tool, in a worse condition than were slaves 
in the Roman Empire. There is the root 
of the matter. You may even have the 
fullest political freedom and prohibit per- 
sonal violence to an absurd degree, and yet 
get results not radically dissimilar, provided 



82 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

you make wealth your sole object and all 
thought of means be set aside. 

Dr. Bussell declares with truth this 
point: "Emancipation on two continents 
sacrificed the real welfare of the slave and 
his intrinsic worth as a person, to the 
impatient vanity of an immediate and 
theatrical triumph." 4 

So it is with our modern freedom and the 
rights of the individual. No master would 
venture nowadays to discipline an appren- 
tice of sixteen years, as the rich pay for 
their sons to be disciplined; for we have 
carried freedom of the person to the point 
of insanity, and daily witness irate parents 
bringing ridiculous charges against ele- 
mentary schoolmasters for employing in the 
mildest way discipline that everyone who 
has been through it at an English public 
school admits to be wholesome. This is 
one reason why a certain type of boy in 
the slums can never be made anything of, 
unless he be got into the navy. But on 
the other hand any employe may be dis- 
missed to starve in the streets at almost a 
moment's notice. You remember the story 
of Mr. Wells' Kipps; how a youth is thrown 



BABYLON 83 

upon the world, without a moment's hesi- 
tation, for an offence which was certainly 
not serious; and it is alleged that in some 
of the larger stores the slightest complaint 
leads to immediate dismissal. These in- 
stances serve to illustrate the fact that it 
is not for the sentimental pampering of 
the negro or the labourer that I am plead- 
ing. And they shew further what freedom 
means to the economically helpless, the 
liberty to be exploited in the interests of 
other people, body and soul, with the risk 
of being thrown on the scrapheap for the 
smallest offence and very often for the 
mere accident of being worked out. Em- 
ployers' liability has to some degree miti- 
gated this, but it is not universal and was 
secured amid the frantic protests of the 
plutocracy. Nor does this condition con- 
cern the very poor alone. Everyone knows 
how the middle classes, including even the 
upper middle class, are suffering from the 
same condition, and their precarious tenure 
of their position is more and more recog- 
nised. A sudden illness, a slight error of 
judgment, a mere accident may destroy 
the whole position of a small professional 



84 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

man, his death reduce to beggary his 
whole family, and take away all their 
chances of a good education. But you are 
familiar with many such cases. 5 

Perhaps our civilisation is not worse than 
others, but it is meaner and more insin- 
cere; and in spite of all our knowledge, it 
is fundamentally stupid in the enormous 
waste of human capacity which it involves. 

Nor can any of us escape the burden. 
It is of no avail to cry, Am I my brother's 
keeper? or for those who are placed as we 
are, away from the stress of it all, to pride 
ourselves on being considerate to depend- 
ents, thinking that is all. We are all 
part of the system. We cannot get away 
from it even when we try, and we profit 
by it when we least intend. 

If you will pardon a few words, of neces- 
sity autobiographical, I will relate an expe- 
rience. Holding what was called a rich 
living (as things go), I resigned it and 
joined a community of men living in vol- 
untary poverty; not the main, but one 
motive, was the feeling that at least one 
would be no more exploiting other classes, 
and that one would be rid of responsibility 



BABYLON 85 

for an order, which such an act flouts. 
But I have not found it so. Primarily 
I am not interested in these topics and 
prefer to be free of them to think of other 
things. But the very means of such simpli- 
fied living as is provided by this regime, and 
every piece of bread I eat and every train 
I travel by, and to some extent the possi- 
bility of such an "order" at all, so far as 
it depends on anything but alms, all issue 
out of the system which is so repellent. The 
gains of the act are purely personal, and 
one's relation to the economic system as a 
whole alters but slightly, nor does the class- 
support grow less for such a surrender, in 
many ways it grows greater, save that 
one is always a recipient, no longer a donor. 
Certainly no man is justified in thinking 
he is freed from all further responsibility 
and may dismiss from his mind the economic 
muddle of the world. He cannot be freed. 
So long as he fives, it is in him; and writhe 
as we may, we must bear the Nessus-shirt 
of modern industrialism and still feel that, 
as we have all our lives been sheltered 
through the blood and tears of others and 
ridden on the crest of the wave, so we do 



86 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

still; and ours will be the guilt if the chains 
of injustice are made heavier. This was 
always the case. But it is more trans- 
parently so now than of yore. The de- 
velopments of credit and transit have 
united mankind more closely than at any 
other time. We all share its evils and its 
benefits. Mr. Bernard Shaw has earned 
the thanks of all for burning into us this 
truth. In Widowers 9 Houses and Mrs. 
Warren's Profession he throws a lurid light, 
not on the evils of our day, but rather on 
all its "pleasant pictures." He shews us 
how the walled gardens of grace and virtue 
which make the life of the few pleasant, 
and it may be noble, are only possible 
through a surrounding quagmire. The cul- 
ture and virtue of the few are won through 
a meanness and avarice which the dwellers 
in the garden would fain forget. The whole 
world of the sheltered classes, with their 
high aims and cultivated tastes, and even 
their very spiritual vision, is seen to be en- 
joying its opportunities, unaware how they 
are the fruit of a putrescent cruelty. 

It is not inequality I am lamenting. 
Inequality may be right or wrong, but it 



BABYLON 87 

has in it nothing revolting. There is more 
apparent inequality between the incomes 
of some of us in this room than between 
our average income and that of the dis- 
inherited classes. What is revolting is 
the conditions which take from a large 
mass of men the means of a worthy per- 
sonal life, which breed child-criminals, pay 
women "the wages of prostitution/ 5 and 
even among those better off produce an 
appalling insecurity. For thousands of peo- 
ple live always on the edge of a precipice, 
and many more are breaking down from 
the overstrain of an age which lives in a 
fever. For is it not true that at present 
services are performed by "private individ- 
uals under competitive conditions, strug- 
gling for life and death on the inclined plane 
that leads to ruin, fighting always for more, 
lest they should be obliged to take less, too 
many of them everywhere competing for 
one job, and the conditions of success not 
only or even mainly merit and capacity, 
still less honesty and rectitude, which may 
be positive disqualifications, but that 
peculiar and intrinsically contemptible art 
we call 'push?'" 6 



88 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

All this I notice not in order to suggest 
a new scheme of social amelioration, but 
to point the need of deliverance. I could 
not omit it. The problem is haunting and 
forbids one to think in quiet of the religious 
and philosophical problems of life. The 
doctrine of original sin forces itself in when 
we would fain be quit of it and discuss high 
themes at leisure. Each man is forced 
to ask himself, Why is civilisation to me 
so gracious a mistress and to others so hard 
a stepmother? Even if we allow much to 
the solidarity of the family, and say the 
individual must share in the life of his 
fathers, we hardly get a full solution. To 
me and to you she gives the power to live, 
not merely to drudge; to form plans and 
win high delights. At our feet she pours 
the treasured memories of the ages; she 
opens the long corridor of history and the 
palaces of all the courts. To us she permits 
to rest by pleasant streams and grants the 
glory of letters and the fellowship of men 
gone by. Why should we have all this 
almost without our will and others be 
born to squalor and foul living? Poverty 
is not the evil in the strict sense. The 



BABYLON 89 

peasants' life, if well cared for, has noth- 
ing in it ignoble. It is the daily grinding 
care, the exposure to foul temptation, 
the blighting of soul, the inferno of the 
slum, and of things we cannot bear to 
picture, that are the fortune of too many 
thousands to leave one a comfortable mind. 
Somewhere there must be wrong, some 
canker of soul among us, in a world which 
keeps its chances for so few and for large 
numbers reserves a slavery worse in many 
ways than that of Pagan Rome. 

"You and I, you must remember, belong 
to the small section of society that has both 
kinds of freedom; and I think it possible 
that we really have on the balance more 
liberty than we could easily secure under 
other conditions, though to my mind the 
value of the liberty is almost destroyed by 
the knowledge of the price which others 
have to pay for it. For these others, the 
mass of men, what freedom really have 
they? Can they effectively choose their 
career, more than under the most bureau- 
cratic socialism? Can they fix their hours 
of work? Can they determine their wage? 
Can they travel? Can they educate them- 



90 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

selves? Can they select their society? 
Can they assure their solitude?" 7 

We may try to turn away from this 
spectacle. We do not like it. It is dull. 
It is so much pleasanter to dwell upon art 
and letters, so much nicer to think of our 
"Christian privileges/ 5 or (if you will), our 
privileges as non-Christians. But there 
they are. They will not let us be. That 
haunting face of the beggar in the street, 
the harlot at the gate, the unemployed, 
the inheritors of disease. Nothing but 
fortune prevents our being like that. "There 
but for the grace of God goes John Brad- 
ford," was said once at the sight of a con- 
victed murderer going to his doom; and the 
words cannot but echo in our ears at any 
sight of a member of the disinherited class. 

Idle it is, and waste of breath, to prate 
of the triumphs of civilisation, or to quote 
the figures of the national income, when at 
its heart there is this festering sore, when 
the proportion of those who really use the 
fruits of our knowledge to those ground 
beneath its car must be smaller than in 
Pagan Rome, far smaller than in medieval 
Europe. Something is wrong, and that 



BABYLON 91 

wrong has been growing with the growth 
of our knowledge and its resulting wealth. 
So much seems bare fact. "There is 
death in the pot" of modern civilisation, 
and it is not like to heal itself. 



Let us turn to the other side and regard 
the life of the triumphant classes, "the 
conquerors" of Mr. Masterman's analysis. 

Does that offer a cheerful spectacle? 
The vulgarity and vices of the rich form a 
theme for satire in all ages and I shall not 
attempt to emulate it. We may talk of 
the ennui and boredom of wealth, and there 
is truth in this. But dull people are not 
always dull to themselves. Jane Austen's 
characters appear to us to have led a some- 
what flat existence. Probably, however, 
to them it was about as amusing as her 
description of it is to us. Dr. Johnson 
defined a fishing-rod as "a rod with a worm 
at one end and a fool at the other." That 
shews that the doctor was no fisherman, but 
it proves nothing against angling. Freak 
dinners and other tasteless caprices of 



92 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

which we hear are probably the highest 
amusements of which those who give them 
are capable — may, indeed, be to them a 
spiritual ascent. 

Other sources of evidence there are, less 
disputable. Despite the advance of hygi- 
enics, is health among the richer classes so 
much better than it used to be? Doubt- 
less more weakly people are kept alive, 
and the average length of life is longer. But 
is there less worrying ill-health than of 
old? Judging by its interest as a topic of 
conversation, and the universal fads about 
diet, the proportion of people driven to 
think about their health is much larger, 
and even fads would not flourish if the 
normal regimen were all that could be 
desired. Doctors appear to think that 
neurasthenia and all forms of brain exhaus- 
tion are on the increase. Not long ago 
we heard of an epidemic of suicide in Ger- 
man schools due to over-pressure, and it 
is said that lunacy is on the increase. In 
setting against this the reduction of suffer- 
ing through the use of anaesthetics we must 
bear in mind that the subjective side of 
ill-health is the most important and the 



BABYLON 93 

most disabling disease is probably a cause 
of less real distress to the patient than 
some form of nerve or brain depression 
which leaves his organs sound. And it is 
in all these regions, where it is felt most, 
that the standard seems getting lower under 
the pressure of modern life and its con- 
tinual fever; and this is the case through 
the whole range of society. An observer 
by no means hostile says that it is true 
even of children; we must not expect them 
to be so healthy as those of a past genera- 
tion. And he gives the ground in excite- 
ment of modern life with all its rush. This 
is the judgment of Mr. Cooper in his 
Twentieth Century Child: 8 

"The normal healthy child of eight or 
ten will do nothing quietly; and when you 
put it to do modern lessons among people 
who live on motor cars, conduct two thirds 
of their correspondence by telegram, and 
want to prosecute half the express trains 
in the kingdom for loitering, in ten years' 
time you will probably have to send it 
to bed for a nerve-cure. Put a boy to 
work full hours at a Board school, and 
later on half-time at a factory, with plenty 



94 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

of home work and worry besides, and 
unwholesome food to complicate matters, 
and the state of his physique will be below 
modern army requirements. It would be 
hard to say in which class of life the child 
pays the higher price for his knowledge. 
But unless we are prepared to face this 
physical deterioration and to induce the 
children to abandon their sixteen years of 
undivided cricket and football for the 
pursuit of knowledge, it is difficult to see 
how any philosopher, statesman, or prophet 
can save the supremacy of England." 

If this is the case with the young, a little 
enquiry at Homburg or Carlsbad would 
reveal a worse state of things among their 
elders ; while even in regard to the triumphs 
of surgery, I have heard a brilliant doctor 
maintain that anaesthetics had caused more 
suffering than they had cured. At least 
there is sufficient evidence that those on the 
crest of the wave are in this respect in no 
very enviable state, and are probably worse 
rather than better off than their fathers 
were. But this is not all. Nor is it the 
main point. The test of a civilisation is 
in its characteristic culture and in the 



BABYLON 95 

type of men and women who thrive best 
in it. 

As I said last time, amid the Babel of the 
world's religions and moralities, it is not 
possible to state what are the governing 
ideals of the triumphant classes at the 
moment, and it is ten to one that if you 
met two dozen at dinner, you would hear a 
dozen different faiths asserted, with all that 
voluble enthusiasm that befits "the light 
half -belie vers of our casual creeds." On 
this point I said enough in my first lecture 
and we need not go further. But if we judge 
by their conduct, we may well ask with 
Archbishop Benson, when he arrived in 
London, "What do these people believe? " 
We have, however, some better evidence 
of the type of characters which thrive in 
our age and may be regarded as its most 
prominent fruit. It is rather the women 
than the men of an epoch who accentuate 
and express its dominant principles, because 
they do so for the most part unconsciously. 
It is not what people actually profess, but 
what they habitually practice, that gives 
the true note of an age. In the novels of 
your distinguished compatriot, Mr. Henry 



96 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

James, we have an accurate and subtle 
portraiture of the manners and aims of 
the fortunate classes; the more valuable 
because it is drawn without reference at 
all to a moral. There we find women in 
plenty, whose speech and thought, more 
subtly delineating itself than in any other 
writer, live for us, as does the whole milieu 
of their life. And what strikes one next 
to the consummate, if a little over-con- 
scious, skill of the artist is the almost com- 
plete lack of any approach to noble aims 
or even interesting characters. They are 
interesting only through the wonderful 
art of the novelist. I mean that they are 
none of them people whom one would 
care to meet twice, and even their immorali- 
ties are only disgusting. What sort of an 
age can it be which speaks in Kate Croy's 
Sense of Honour or in the chivalrous friend- 
ship of Charlotte in The Golden Bowl? If 
you go further and take the crowd of 
people who figure in the Awkward Age or 
in What Maisie Knew or in the Sacred 
Fount, no one can deny that you have the 
picture of a society exclusive, outwardly 
refined, and sheltered from all the wider 



BABYLON 97 

interests of men. Their life is essentially 
a private one, and their amusements seem 
never to reach beyond a flirtation that 
suggests something more. Without (so far 
as we can tell) intending or desiring to 
do so, Mr. Henry James has allowed the 
emptiness, the meanness, and the drab 
morals of our day a hardly less perfect 
monument than was given to the Renais- 
sance women under the great Elizabeth. 
Compare them with the heroines of George 
Meredith; compare their whole life with 
the sinners of Thackeray. Why, Becky 
Sharp is worth the lot of them! She may 
have been bad, but she was great; they share 
her badness, but are little, eternally little; 
and indeed the whole scene of morals sug- 
gests that hero of Kipling's poem who had 
no deeds that were not second-hand, and 
only committed adultery because he read of 
it in a French book. Screaming ever more 
discordantly in the effort to reach beyond 
the top-note, the men and women of our 
latter day have achieved only a prevailing 
flatness of spirit; all this mirrors itself 
to perfection in the great writer I have 
been discussing, and it does so the better 



98 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

owing to the inwardness of his method, 
which displays the soul from within and also 
because the men and women he takes are 
as a rule of no outstanding quality, but 
such as may be met with in any drawing- 
room. 

What then are the outward products of 
our existing system? What good things will 
it leave to posterity to set by the monu- 
ments of the past days? Si monumentum 
quaeris circumspice. Walk down the streets 
of any typically modern town, or take, if 
you can, a bird's-eye view of a region, like 
the Black country. These are the things 
we have really made. We have no right 
to claim as ours the great cathedrals, or 
the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, any 
more than the Hotel de Ville of Brussels or 
the Rathhaus of Rothenburg an der Tauber. 
It is the factories, the banks, the hotels, 
and the streets and the structure of our 
towns which display what the age cares 
for. I do not say that all is bad, or even 
that so far as street architecture goes there 
has not been within the last twenty years 
a great improvement. Here and there a 
bank or a great shop, or a station like 



BABYLON 99 

the Pennsylvania Railway Station is a 
decent bit of architecture. But taking 
the multitude of our buildings alone, our 
municipal buildings, our museums and 
modern universities, our capitals, our in- 
dustrial cities, our watering-places and 
towns of pleasure, our suburbs, rich and 
poor, what sort of impression will they 
leave on a future age? One observer of 
English life, after enlarging on the growth 
of private ostentation, compares our age 
with one or two others in terms hardly 
extravagant. 

"Dr. Dill 9 has shewn in the Roman 
Peace, during the age of the Antonines 
and after, the people of the Empire turning 
with enthusiasm to great communal build- 
ing, and every city setting itself to such 
achievements as remain today the wonder 
of the world. . . . What kind of building 
will represent for the astonishment of 
future ages the harvest of the super-wealth 
of the British Peace? The signs are not 
propitious. A Byzantine cathedral at West- 
minster, a Gothic cathedral at Liverpool, 
a few town-halls and libraries of sober 
solidity, the white buildings which today 



100 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

line Whitehall and fill the passing stranger 
with bewilderment at a race 'that thus 
could build ' will be the chief legacies of this 
present generation. The thirteenth century- 
gave us the cathedrals; the sixteenth gave 
us the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge 
and the noblest of English country houses. 
This tiny England with populations in the 
aggregate less than that of London today 
and wealth incomparably smaller has 
left us possessions which we can admire 
but not equal. 'The work which we col- 
lective children of God do/ complained 
Matthew Arnold, 'our grand centre of life, 
our city for us to dwell in, is London — Lon- 
don with its unutterable external hideous- 
ness, with its internal canker of publice 
egestas prudentium opulanter unequalled by 
the world/ It was this contrast which 
gave point to a question which otherwise 
the plain man would put by as absurd. 
'If England were swallowed up by the 
sea tomorrow 7 , which of the two, a hundred 
years hence, would most excite the interest 
and admiration of mankind, the England 
of the last twenty years or the England of 
Elizabeth?"' 



BABYLON 101 

And truly the outward aspect of the world 
in which we live is not such as to arouse 
extravagant gratification, even though we 
have tasteful drawing-rooms and pleasant 
private gardens. If we leave out of it 
all these legacies of a past age, like our 
churches, or the immemorial beauty of 
the English country side, and think of the 
world so far as it is the work of the nine- 
teenth century, can any man, however 
much an optimist, be enthusiastic? Do 
we not feel refreshed when we do the 
bidding of William Morris 10 and 

"Forget six counties overhung with smoke; 
Forget the snorting steam and piston-stroke; 
Forget the spreading of the hideous town; 
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, 
And dream of London small, and white, and clean, 
The clear Thames bordered by the gardens green; 
Think that below bridge the keen sapping waves 
Smite some few keels that bear Levantine staves, 
And cloth of Bruges and hogsheads of Guienne, 
While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer's 

pen 
Moves over bills of lading"? 

William Cobbett was no dreamy senti- 
mentalist, and he used to talk of London 
"as a great wen," and I suppose that 



102 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

while the centre may be improved, that if 
the whole area be included, the prospect 
would be more squalid now than when he 
wrote. To set against medieval Florence 
or Durham or Tewkesbury, all character- 
istic and typical, what are our types? 
The factory-town, acres of mean streets, the 
slums of our cities — places of which one 
very unromantic observer said, "The best 
thing that could happen to them would 
be to be burnt down." It is not that there 
were no ugly or dirty or repulsive sights in 
the past, but that their typical monu- 
ments are beautiful, and ours are — what 
we know. Nor can it be said that they 
are greatly altered for the better by our 
jubilee clock-towers, the piers of our water- 
ing-places, or the frock-coated effigies of 
municipal notabilities. In other matters 
comparison is easier. One reason of the 
delight in the old masters is that the world 
which they depicted in costume and colour 
was so much more beautiful. Compare 
the colours and lines of a Fra Angelico or 
Pinturicchio's Griselda with any to be 
found in a modern street. It is the life 
out of which these things grew that is so 



BABYLON 103 

much worthier than ours, or than, say, the 
grand siecle with its pompous affectations. 
For no one would deny the exceptional 
beauties of our civilisation any more than 
the rare glory of an artistic genius, like that 
of Whistler who painted it; but its char- 
acteristic drabness and prevailing squalor 
make one long to cry out 

"Oh Love! could'st thou and I with Fate conspire 
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, 

Would we not shatter it to bits? And then 
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?" 

For this ugliness is self-chosen. It is the 
lie in the soul. We flatter ourselves by 
supposing it incidental to an age of me- 
chanical invention and much use of iron. 
But iron girders may be beautiful and 
marble palaces vulgar. As Mr. Wells 
shewed in a New Utopia, a society with 
peace at its heart could make use of all 
and more than all our mechanical acquire- 
ments and yet have its bridges, its rail- 
roads, and its factories noble and serene, 
ministers to the life of the spirit instead 
of torments. No one, I suppose, would 
deny the dignity of your Pennsylvania 
Railway Station, and I could name at least 



/ 



104 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

one famous Italian cathedral which is 
in many ways repulsive. Nor is it for want 
of money spent that our world is ugly. 
One authority declares that there is more 
spent on art in our schools in a single year 
than there was in the whole fourteenth 
century. 11 

The lust of personal wealth and the pre- 
vailing fever leave men with no eyes for 
what is worthy or base in this civilisation. 
Provided they can make their homes pleas- 
ant and decorate them with a certain 
measure of taste, they will contemplate 
in comfort cities which have no single 
public building worthy of the name and 
populations squalid and ill-clothed. It is 
not iron or engines, it is the unchecked 
operation of greed that makes life so hid- 
eous; and until the soul of man is weary 
of his millions, we need hardly look for 
much improvement. 12 

This is the point. It is a new soul that 
the world needs, not a scheme of reforms. 
The only source of such new life is faith 
of one kind or another. From many ob- 
servers comes the cry for life, for deliver- 
ance, for some uplifting power. The cry, 



BABYLON 105 

though little regarded as yet in the seats of 
the mighty, will ere long be triumphant, 
unless the world is to go the way of other 
decadent civilisations and pass through 
self-indulgence to ruin. The remedies sug- 
gested often differ, but the sense of need 
is wide-spread. Let us state some instances. 
Rudolf Eucken of Jena, one of the weight- 
iest of living philosophers, preaches strongly 
this very need of redemption. He is no 
upholder of evangelical tradition. Indeed 
he has added one chapter to his work on 
Christianity and the New Idealism to redeem 
him from the stigma of orthodoxy. Yet it 
is the fundamental idea of the evangelical 
faith which animates him. He argues that 
the Western civilisation is unable either 
to effect man's salvation or to satisfy his 
deepest needs. Alike from the intellectual 
and the practical standpoint Eucken argues 
the needs of those ideas of redemptive 
grace and supernatural life which find their 
expression in the Christian Church. Per- 
haps I may be permitted to quote. 13 

"What do we see? Whirling complexity, 
restless hurry and pursuit, a passionate 
exaltation of self and an overweening 



106 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

pushing of its claims against those of others; 
life occupied with alien interests rather 
than its own; no inward problems or in- 
ward motives; little pure enthusiasm or 
genuine love; the fostering and furthering 
of self ever the dominant note, despite all 
boastful profession and even some really 
honest work; man, with his likes and dis- 
likes, the supreme arbiter of good and evil, 
true and false, so that the main goal of 
endeavour is to win social favour and 
respect appearances. All this, however 
much it may make profession of following 
after ideal goals and being guided by ideal 
sentiments, yet reveals in every part of it 
an inner insincerity, a repellant unreality, a 
spiritual tameness and hollowness." 

"To every thinking man the great alter- 
native presents itself, the Either — Or. 
Either there is something older and higher 
than this purely humanistic culture or life 
ceases to have any meaning or value" 14 

And once more: 

"We may dismiss all hope of giving life 
meaning and value by a mere further 
development of this purely humanistic 
culture. Such a culture, even if its goal 



BABYLON 107 

were obtainable, would not satisfy us. 
It has blossomed out freely during our 
modern period, and it has been successful 
in diverting the stream of life into its own 
channels. But the more independent and 
exclusive it becomes, the more it repels 
the intrusion of any influence and friendly 
supplement from the long centuries of past 
labour, the more clearly are its limitations 
seen, the more certainly does it live out its 
influence and bring about its own downfall. 
"We are feeling that, at the present 
moment, and with growing acuteness, a 
weariness of the world and a deep dislike 
to its limitations are becoming more and 
more general. We feel that life must for- 
feit all meaning and value if man may not 
strive towards some lofty goal in depend- 
ence on a Power that is higher than man 
and as he reaches forward realize himself 
more fully than he could ever do under 
the conditions of sense and experience. 
Cut off from the larger life of the universe 
and shut up in a sphere of his own, he is 
condemned to an unbearably narrow and 
paltry existence, and the deeps of his own 
nature are locked away from him. Thus 



108 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

today we hear a great deal of the super- 
human and the superman, but for all the 
genuine longing such a movement may 
embody it cannot but degenerate into mere 
idle words if this superhuman be sought 
within the world of sense-experience, within 
the sphere of our immediate existence. 
For man is far too closely bound by the 
fetters of his nature and his destiny to be 
renewed in life and being by the mere 
magic of a word. Thus he must either break 
with the realistic culture or renounce all 
hope of inwardly raising humanity and 
realizing the meaning of life. Only a shal- 
low and trivial philosophy can deem any 
third course possible." 15 

In other words, man is once more asking 
the question, "What must I do to be 
saved?" And those who, like Nietzsche, 
preach salvation by the superman are in 
reality pointing to a world beyond, although 
they eschew with scorn all notion of a 
gospel from jenseits. Eucken, indeed, has 
no doubt that our fundamental need is the 
need of a redemptive religion and that it 
can be met in no other fashion. 

"Discontent with the world as it is, till 



BABYLON 109 

at last such a world becomes unendurable, 
is what drives the soul to religion. 

"From religion we hope to gain that 
which we cannot gain from the world, but 
at the same time cannot do without. 

"Thus the question that presses itself 
on us is the question where, and how it is, 
that we are conscious of a defect, a disturb- 
ance, a warping of existence, which will 
not allow us to rest. 

"In a word, it is the problem of evil that 
is the winnowing fan for religions as well 
as for persons, and it is their solution of 
this problem which is the real test of their 
pretensions. 

"Here, more than anywhere else, life 
is concentrated into one question and one 
answer." 16 

Sir Oliver Lodge again, the distinguished 
physicist, has declared his dissatisfaction 
with some elements of traditional religion. 
Yet he emphasizes the truth of a world of 
supernatural agencies in contact with man, 
and more than anyone else has he brought 
into relief the difference between the view 
of the world thus opened and the closed 
system of rationalism. 17 



110 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

"This is the kernel of what I have to 
say — that orthodox modern science shows 
us a self-contained and self-sufficient uni- 
verse, not in touch with anything beyond 
or above itself; the general trend and 
outline of it known; nothing supernat- 
ural or miraculous, no intervention of 
beings other than ourselves being conceived 
possible. 

"While religion, on the other hand, 
requires us constantly and consciously to 
be in touch — even affectionately in touch 
— with a power, a mind, a being or beings, 
entirely out of our sphere, entirely beyond 
our scientific ken. The universe contem- 
plated by religion is by no means self- 
contained or self-sufficient, it is dependent 
for its origin and maintenance, as we are 
for daily bread and future hopes, upon the 
power and good-will of a being or beings of 
which science has no knowledge. Science 
does not indeed always or consistently deny 
the existence of such transcendent beings 
nor does it make any effectual attempt to 
limit their potential powers, but it definitely 
disbelieves in their exerting any actual 
influence on the progress of events, or in 



BABYLON 111 

their producing or modifying the simplest 
physical phenomenon. 

"For instance, it is now considered un- 
scientific to pray for rain. ... It ought, 
however, to be admitted by Natural Philos- 
ophers that the unscientific character of 
prayer for rain depends really not upon its 
conflict with any known physical law, 
since it need invoke no greater interference 
with the order of nature than is implied in a 
request to a gardener to water the garden — 
it does not really depend upon the impossi- 
bility of causing rain to fall, when other- 
wise it might not — but upon the disbelief 
of science in any power who can and will 
attend and act. 

"The root question of outstanding con- 
troversy between science and faith rests 
upon two distinct conceptions of the uni- 
verse: the one, that of a self-contained and 
self-sufficient universe with no outlook into 
or links with anything beyond, uninfluenced 
by any life or mind except such as is con- 
nected with a visible and tangible material 
body, and the other conception, that of a 
universe lying open to all manner of spiritual 
influences, permeated through and through 



112 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

with a Divine spirit, guided and watched 
by living minds, acting through the medium 
of law indeed, but with intelligence and 
love behind the law, a universe by no means 
self-sufficient or self-contained, but with 
sensitive tendencies groping with another 
super-sensuous order of existence, where 
reign laws hitherto unimagined by science, 
but laws as real and as mighty as those by 
which the material universe is governed. 

"'For nothing is that errs from law/ 
According to the one conception, faith is 
childish and prayer absurd; the only in- 
dividual immortality lies in the memory 
of descendants; benevolence and cheerful 
acquiescence in fate are the highest attri- 
butes possible; and the future of the 
human race is determined by the law of 
gravitation and the circumstances of space. 

"According to the other conception, 
prayer may be mighty to the removal of 
mountains, and by faith we may feel our- 
selves citizens of an eternal and glorious 
cosmogony of mutual help and coopera- 
tion — advancing from lowly stages to ever 
higher states of happy activity world with- 
out end — and may catch in anticipation 






BABYLON 113 

some glimpse of that 'one far off divine 
event to which the whole creation moves'. 

"The whole controversy hinges, in one 
sense, on a practical pivot, the efficacy of 
prayer. Is prayer to hypothetical and 
super-sensuous beings as senseless and use- 
less as it is unscientific? Or does prayer 
pierce through the husk and apparent 
covering of the sensuous universe, and 
reach something living, loving, and helpful 
beyond? 

"And in another sense the controversy 
turns upon a question of fact. Do w^e live 
in a universe permeated with life and mind, 
life and mind independent of matter and 
unlimited in individual duration? Or is 
this life limited in space to the surface of 
planetary masses, and in time to the dura- 
tion of the material envelope essential to 
its manifestation? The answer is given in 
one way by orthodox modern science; 
and in another way by Religion of all 
times. " 

Huxley in his famous Romanes Lecture, 
though I suppose he remained in his chosen 
agnosticism, yet argued for an ethical 
system very different from anything sug- 



114 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

gested by rationalism; if the cosmic pro- 
cess is to be thwarted by another, and if 
as a fact human life has been ennobled by 
such thwarting, it would seem that there 
must be in the nature of man some deeps 
which are not arrived at by any merely 
mechanical evolution. 

Nietzsche again, deliberately anti-Chris- 
tian though he be, is equally emphatic in 
condemnation of the present situation. 
His system turns on the need for a new 
race incarnating a new ideal. His doctrine 
of human nature, as sunk in darkness until 
the superman comes to redeem it, is curi- 
ously akin to Christianity. I think also 
that in his assertion of the worth of per- 
sonality he is far less vitally opposed to 
our faith than he is to that Eastern pessi- 
mism, masquerading as altruism, for which 
he partly mistook it. Though he does not 
accept the Christian doctrine of the indi- 
vidual, his attitude is nearer to it than the 
rationalist scheme which he attacked; while 
he has been called more than once funda- 
mentally mystic. He is like Lucifer, son 
of the morning, a spirit fallen from heaven; 
and after all his eloquence, his superman is 



BABYLON 115 

only a god from the machine, no redeemer 
from above, but a new conquering aristoc- 
racy, the "splendid blonde beast/ 5 Like 
Hegel's, his philosophy comes to the Kaiser 
at last. 

If we take writers more popular, we wit- 
ness the same phenomenon. Mr. Bernard 
Shaw in Man and Superman preaches a 
similar doctrine — that the world is very 
evil, that it needs redemption, and that 
somehow is to come out of eugenics. In 
that large class of books of which Mr. 
Wells' New Utopia is a type, and the novels 
of Mr. John Galsworthy are an element, 
we find very much the same features. The 
dominant ideals of commercialism are held 
up to scorn and some kind of evangel is 
proclaimed which is to free us from its 
accumulated horrors. 

The lyrical raptures of the Cobdenite 
school are almost forgotten, except when 
some stranded millionaire like Mr. Carnegie 
declares that all is the best in the best of 
possible worlds, and that in a very brief 
space we shall reach perfection if things go 
on as they are. Our world is fonder of 
riches, perhaps, than ever it was, but I 



116 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

think that it is ceasing to believe in its 
idol. The danger is that it should cease to 
have any belief at all. Wearied of its hope 
of finding in material prosperity a satisfac- 
tion for its insatiable desires, and robbed 
through that hope of all spiritual ideals, it 
may sink into a fatigued scepticism and 
fall a prey to pessimism. This appears to 
be discernible of many even now. It is 
this process which needs to be arrested. 
No order can endure of which the naturally 
energetic elements are sceptical. Some 
faith it must have or else it is doomed. 
If the faith in worldly goods should go 
and nothing take its place, ours will be 
doomed, unless a spirit gives light from 
beyond and help be found in the saving 
remnant which have not bowed the knee 
to Baal. 

The crying need of the time is for some- 
thing to shake men out of their compla- 
cency. In the literal sense we need seers 
— men who can see things as they are and 
burn into men the facts of life in this twen- 
tieth century. This work is actually being 
done by a host of writers, many of them 
non-Christian. It will be said doubtless, 



BABYLON 117 

by the practical man of wealth, that how- 
ever they differ, they are all alike in 
being dreamers. Thank God for that. 
For a world sunk in material satisfaction, 
a society throttled with comfort, it is only 
when the old men see visions and the 
young men dream dreams that there is 
much hope of deliverance. For that is the 
point. Deliverance is what they all cry 
for. There is something wrong; as a man 
of science (not a Christian) put it to me, 
''this world has got appendicitis." 

Religion is far from being the only 
scheme of deliverance — our social schemes 
are also that. Nor is the Christian the 
only religion of redemption; that is also 
the note of Buddhism. But it is something 
to have it recognised that it is redemption 
that is needful, and not mere continuance; 
for progress in the sense of development 
of existing principles will not suffice to 
secure well-being. It is a change that is 
needed, a revolution of the spirit; and if 
this once be realized, the strength of the 
claims of the Christian Church is in a 
fair way to be felt. Of the social reformer 
we may ask, "Where are you likely to get 



118 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

the driving force to bring about those 
tremendous changes unless you have a 
religious faith, or something very like it? 
Change the economic system of society 
without somehow changing the passion and 
the pride of man and you will but change 
the ways in which the strong will exploit 
the weak. Without some change of heart, 
some fresh orientation of the spirit, how are 
your great social changes to be effected 
or effectual?" If, on the other hand, we 
admit so much and look to some system 
like Buddhism for deliverance, I think the 
chances in its favour are very small, and 
that, even were it purged of all local asso- 
ciations. I do not think that the West will 
ever accept such a system, which, though 
it indeed promises redemption, promises 
it as a deliverance from life, (personality) 
whereas the Christian redemption is a 
deliverance from evil, from that canker 
which impedes the upward spring of life. 
In our age, with all its unregulated ideals, 
with its fear of materialism and pathetic 
unrest, there is one craving in which there 
is hope — the cry for life, life, more life. 
This is in various ways the secure and 



BABYLON 119 

unassailable support of all those schemes 
of reform which are rife among us. It 
may mean the claim that even the humblest 
shall share in the opportunities of living a 
full and varied life; it may mean the cry 
(not in itself illegitimate) for full develop- 
ment of individuality; it may mean a cry 
for something deeper, some ground on which 
to rest, some home of the soul wherein 
the spirit may spread its wings and slake 
its thirst: so far as it does, (and at bottom 
there is always something of this element 
hidden) it can only drive men on to that 
source of all life. He came not only that 
our joy might be full, but that men "might 
have life, and might have it more abun- 
dantly." The need is for some scheme of 
deliverance, some new hope. The choice 
lies between schemes limited to this world, 
or schemes which give redemption at the 
cost of personal existence, and the Chris- 
tian scheme, which "preaches peace to 
them that are far off and to them that are 
nigh/ 5 because it worships One who is 
not only the Light, but is also the Life 
of men, and not only their Life, but also 
their Saviour. 



120 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

It is the faith which accepts and trans- 
forms pain, which admits and consecrates 
freedom, which faces and conquers sin, 
holding the truths of life not in dialectic con- 
sistency, but in practical harmony, which 
alone, amid the wrecks of systems and the 
profound disillusion of men, has any hope 
or prospect of winning them to peace. 
That faith of the Cross it is that alone can 
satisfy, and it is, while akin to the other 
faiths, more unlike them than like, and while 
in moral exhortation not unlike the nobler 
philosophies, at bottom something differ- 
ent from any, something more splendid, 
more difficult, more unfathomable, because 
its essence and its ground are other-worldly, 
its God One who is also man, and its 
supreme act the execution of a criminal. 
Something of this uniqueness I shall hope 
to discuss in our next lecture. 



LECTURE III 

CALVARY OR THE CHALLENGE OF 
THE CROSS 

Ian van Eyck in the Adoration of the Lamb 
has given to the world what is often said 
to be its greatest painting. All of you 
know either by sight or reproduction that 
glory of colour and composition. No one, 
however far removed from that faith which 
alone made such a picture possible, but 
is at once awed by its presentment of the 
Victim slain from before the foundation 
of the world, and its exaltation of that 
sacramental chalice in which the Blood is 
made available for all ages and every con- 
dition. For it is not the crowd of wor- 
shippers in all their bravery of blue and 
scarlet on which the eye rests, nor even the 
far green distances with their castles, which 
make the wonder of the picture, but the 

figures in the centre, the altar with its 

121 



122 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

image of a Lamb and the chalice flowing 
blood. There summed up in an image at 
once bold and compelling, is the whole 
notion of Evangelical Catholic Christianity, 
stretching right through history, binding 
together the ages in a unity of adoring love. 
Saints and monks, emperors, kings, popes 
and bishops and cardinals, and all the pro- 
cession of knights and virgins uniting in one 
supreme act of worship gaze upon the Lamb ; 
so that as one looks, one almost hears the 
words: "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain 
to receive power and riches and wisdom and 
strength and honour and glory and bless- 
ing. And every creature which is in heaven, 
and on the earth and under the earth, and 
such as are in the sea, and all that are in 
them, heard I saying, Blessing and honour 
and glory and power be unto Him that 
sitteth upon the throne and unto the 
Lamb for ever and ever/' 

That painting represents, with enduring 
beauty, acts which are repeated in every 
church and chapel of Christendom. For 
whether a man hold high or low views of 
the Sacrament of the Altar, all who hold 
to historic Christianity would be at one 






CALVARY 123 

in admitting that in the act of communion 
they had hold of God. I take the Eucharist 
as a starting-point, since this act, even by 
the admission of our adversaries, is treated 
as the centre of the Christian cult, and be- 
cause it takes to its highest point the idea 
of worship; and in such a way that it can- 
not be compared with some purely inward 
process like meditation, which may be said 
to have some efficacy, even though there 
were no outside forces to pray to, no voice 
nor any that answered. For what does the 
Eucharist involve? Even the simplest per- 
son who receives it with faith implies cer- 
tain beliefs by his act. His presence asserts 
this at least: that God, the ultimate reality, 
however much more than personal, is yet 
so far personal that He can enter into inti- 
macy with men; that man with his limited 
freedom has used it wrongly and is through 
that false independence in a state of misery, 
from which he can not deliver himself; 
that such deliverance has, however, taken 
place by the very act of God, who has 
made the most marvellous exercise of His 
omnipotence by "emptying Himself and 
taking the form of a servant" and dying 



124 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

as a common criminal; that death, how- 
ever, was not the end, but the beginning, 
for it was succeeded by a rising again and 
a continued life in the bosom of the Father, 
that is in union with the sacred heart of all 
reality; and that life communicates itself to 
us through prayer and the sacramental gift. 
It is fair to add that among those who 
hold to Evangelical historic Christianity 
the pure Zwinglians attach no value to the 
sacramental gift, but even they would ad- 
mit it to be the culmination of prayer and 
the most distinctively Christian service. 

What I want here to emphasize is the 
astonishing audacity of these assumptions. 
They are irreconcilable not only with 
materialism, but with every non-miraculous 
theory of religion. They involve a view 
alike of this w T orld and the other quite 
alien from the closed circle contemplated 
by the materialist philosopher, or even 
the vague harmony of the Pantheistic 
monist. They assert the supernatural 
character of the events which led to the 
founding of the Church, and the immor- 
tality of the individual spirit. They are 
not to be reconciled with any form of 



CALVARY 125 

Pantheism, though they of course admit 
and to some extent involve a doctrine of 
Divine Immanence. All Christians believe 
in Pantheism — "for in Him we live and 
move and have our being. " They are 
opposed, like the facts of our personal life, 
to the notion that the course of things is 
one of purely inevitable sequences; and 
as against the modern tendency to deify 
the undoubted fact of the continuity of life 
and ignore the equally undoubted fact of 
the uniqueness of single moments and the 
creative activity of the self, they assert 
the catastrophic, absolute newness of events 
and individuals and the value of each man's 
soul not as a means but as an end — some- 
thing for itself. They do not, indeed, 
assert man's entire independence. The 
whole notion of the fall and redemption 
means that our freedom, though real, is 
partial and a goal toward which we strive. 

"Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." 

But they assert such independence as 
is involved in the self-direction of our 
acts and the power to ignore God if we 
will. Neither pure socialism nor abso- 



126 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

lute individualism finds warrant in the 
Gospel. 

That appeals, indeed, to each man as such 
and assures him of his eternal worth. He 
is worth the life and death of Jesus Christ. 
But again it does not appeal to man as a 
mere unrelated unit, but as a member of 
society. In this it is true not only to the 
earliest, but also to the very latest social 
and political reflection, as it is also to the 
daily life of man in family, in school or 
college, in club or union, in state or nation; 
only it offers him his life in that one so- 
ciety, whose raison d'etre lies in the other 
world. 

That is the point — the other-worldly 
nature of the Christian claim. To return 
to our symbol, the Eucharist involves that 
claim in a form at once social and indi- 
vidual and so startling and direct, as to 
leave no doubt of the fact. Consequently 
it is a stumbling block to many, who other- 
wise accept that view of the Faith I am 
putting forward. Indeed the sacramental 
idea has been so closely bound up with 
the life of the Church that it seems un- 
reasonable to suppose that you can cut 



CALVARY 127 

this out while preserving all the other super- 
natural elements. As a fact, we see more 
and more that along with this vanish all the 
others, in course of time. In this, however, 
the arresting challenge of the Sacraments 
and the claim that therein God gives Him- 
self to man, there is but an extension of 
what is involved in every prayer to God 
through the name of Jesus. For it is on 
the uniqueness of Jesus that all depends. 
Church and Sacraments exist only as the 
expression of that life here, the extensions 
of the Incarnation as they have been called. 
It is this, the Cross of Christ, which is so 
startling, "madness to the Greeks, to the 
Jews offensive/' and always will be. This 
faith it is which defies those attempts, which 
were they not pathetic would be ridiculous, 
to assimilate the Christian "way" to any 
of these humanist codes of morals or social 
ethics or mere theism, which bear to it a 
superficial resemblance. Let us avoid the- 
ological language; but I think we can say 
that so far as creed goes, a man is a Chris- 
tian or a non-Christian so far as he can 
enter into the spirit of the hymn "When I 
survey the wondrous Cross." What a gulf 



128 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

that makes, not of piety, but of outlook, 
between the two. 

The non-Christian may be the more 
self -de voted, kinder, stronger, even the 
more religious of the two; very likely he 
has fewer skeletons in his cupboards, fewer 
sins that are shames to cover up than I 
have. Yet he is different, with a different 
ideal of humility. He would probably 
despise me for mine. I believe, as the 
non-Christian does not, that my life is a 
dialogue, lived in intimacy with One who 
lived as man and died to restore the 
peace broken by my act and deed. I 
believe, and he does not, that in Jesus I 
have a new life, and that the centre of that 
life is not here. Those words "Ye are dead 
and your life is hid with Christ in God" 
are words of tremendous import and must 
at least imply that the Christian as a son 
of the Resurrection contemplates life from 
a standpoint beyond, and finds his motive 
force there. He is one, as it were, who has 
come back, but only for a little while; the 
Christian's life is a sharing of the great 
forty days. Moreover, that life I believe 
to be nourished by a gift as real, though 



CALVARY 129 

spiritual, as the physical bread which sup- 
ports my animal life, and this gift implies 
the frequent irruptions of the Divine into 
this world. Also, and perhaps this point 
is the most shining, this life, though not 
to be shunned or despised, is but an epi- 
sode in a career which knows no end to its 
adventures 

"With ever a new surprise 
And clouds eternally new/' 

Now such beliefs create an almost unbridge- 
able chasm between the Christian and other 
men. As S. Paul said, "If Christ be not 
risen, we are of all men most miserable." 
If Jesus be no Saviour, and the other world 
no home, then we labour under the most 
lamentable of all delusions. So far as we 
are really trying to live this Christian life, 
we are directing all our actions on the 
ghastliest of shams. We have staked all 
for nothing — not even an off-chance. How 
it is that our faith appears aught but sheer 
lunacy to those who hold it not, I cannot 
for the life of me imagine. I suppose it 
is due to our positive faith being weak 
and our actual worldliness so strong. There 
is indeed no reason why Christians and 
10 



130 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS JtOADS 

others should not unite for many things 
which have to be done. In this world we 
have to eat and drink and dress, whatever 
comes after. But that men should treat 
the distinction as unimportant or indif- 
ferent, or still worse, that the Christian 
should do so, and should suppose he can 
reduce within narrow limits the difference 
between himself and, say, a high-minded 
idealist, is only to be explained by our 
practical refusal to live as we pray. All 
this is less true of those who believe in a 
world of individual immortality. But as 
a matter of fact, that belief is held so 
little outside the Christian Church and 
unguaranteed by the Resurrection, that we 
need not seriously consider it. Despite 
the prevalence of certain habits, we are no 
longer living in the eighteenth century. 

Let us consider two tempers of mind 
both found alike among Christians and 
non-Christians; the one I will call the 
world-accepting and the other the world- 
renouncing temper. We shall see that 
they differ toto coelo according as they are 
held by a Christian or by an unbeliever; 
while their resemblance is superficial. Upon 



CALVARY 131 

every act and every art of human life, upon 
its amusements, its purposes and all its 
interests, the other-worldly reference sets 
its stamp. If "Light be the only subject 
of a picture/' then the light that shines 
from Calvary makes a new picture, and 
though every outward object and every 
isolated act of two men would be the same, 
yet the total picture would differ, as much 
as a landscape of lake and mountain seen 
in the rose of a July dawn or the grey chill 
of a November fog. Like S. Bernard, who, 
passing the Lake of Geneva, did not notice 
the water or the sky, so deeply was he 
absorbed, the other-worldly person may 
regard the glory of seas and skies, the 
harmonies of home, and all its interests 
as so many hindrances — things which get 
in his way, keeping back the day when he 
shall pierce behind the veil. To such an 
one life seems but a waiting time till he 
sees God face to face and is " satisfied." 
As S. Paul put it, "having a desire to 
depart and be with Christ, which is far 
better." Life here in such a view is a pis 
alter, a duty to be done, and delight comes 
only by-and-bye. The mystics speak like 



132 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

this, or many of them. It is clear that 
what is said represents a real experience, 
that they feel that the supreme cross of all 
is life on earth, the sense of separation. 
This life they fill with toil and sacrifice, 
and the tortures of the martyrs are not to 
be compared with the fire of the longing 
that consumes them, the sense that "here 
they have no continuing city." As they 
wander in life's ways, to them it is all one 
whether the path is smooth or rough; they 
hardly feel the cutting stones, driven by 
that irresistible desire within, the nostalgia 
of the infinite. I am not saying that this 
temper is a right one or that there is not a 
higher stage, that set down by Dante in 
the words 

"In la sua volontade e nostra pace" 

where the soul is so deeply possessed by 
God that life or death is indifferent, and 
there where it is at any moment is the 
place nearest Him; just as in the perfect 
Jesuit "La sancta obbedienza fa d'ogni 
luogo Paradiso." 

As a fact, however, the world-renouncing 
temper exists. It may lead to a morbid 



CALVARY 133 

contempt of life or a cloistral detachment 
from human activity. But that it forms 
one element in the experience of many 
Christians would appear evident from the 
number and popularity of the hymns, dat- 
ing from all ages, which express it. We 
may decry these other-worldly aims, yet 
there must be some instinct, deep seated in 
human nature, which could unite men of 
such varying ecclesiastical affinity as the 
author of "0 Quanta Qualia" of the 
twelfth century, or the "Urbs Beata " of the 
thirteenth, "Jerusalem my happy home" 
of the sixteenth, or "I'm but a stranger 
here" of the nineteenth. Doubtless many 
people enjoy singing them who are very far 
from feeling "like poor exiles on Babylon's 
strand" and would be no fonder of their 
heavenly than they are of their earthly 
home, except for singing purposes; but 
there must be many to whom they appeal 
or they would not continue to be sung. 

Now let us consider the opposite stand- 
point, the world-embracing temper, as seen 
by a Christian. Just because of its other- 
worldly reference, this life is seen as having 
not less but more value. Our life now 



134 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

and here is to us the revelation of the 
Eternal. Here in a world of wonder and 
ceaseless change we are set, and we are to 
make the most of it all, like boys of school- 
days. Just as the onward reference of 
youth, so far from hindering rather en- 
hances the zest and meaning of life during 
training (unless by a calculating meanness 
we ruin the present), so with the Christian 
hope, for it shews us every act as having 
an enduring as well as a transient worth. 
The hues of the hills and the seas, every 
scene or tone of beauty, is no butterfly 
delight, but is a sacrament of the Love 
behind. Art and all embodiments of im- 
agery are not less but more valuable because 
they are not in themselves perfect, but hints 
and glimpses of the '" altogether lovely." 
This is the true difference between romantic 
and classical art, illustrated by that be- 
tween Gothic and Renaissance buildings, 
of which the former has been called " ap- 
parent pictures of unapparent realities" 
and the latter "simple representation. " 
The former is never quite so perfect and 
rounded, because it is shot through with 
hues of the eternal. It is never absolutely 



CALVARY 135 

itself, because its meaning is to be a symbol. 
It is great more by what it suggests than by 
what it states, and its profoundest beauty 
leaves the spirit still athirst. It embodies, 
whether in buildings or in verse or in 
painting, the mystery of all creation; and 
however irreligious the artist, the work 
reminds us that the true home of the spirit 
is "the land that is very far off," and yet 
for that very reason can sound in echoes 
on earth, in the dying fall of a melody, in 
the haunting inscrutable beauty of a lyric, 
or in some dream in stone, which makes 
the spirit at once satisfied and overflowing, 
so that the heart all but bursts from a joy 
that is yet only the other side of pain. "I 
saw thee and I sought for thee; I saw thee 
and I wanted thee/ 5 says the mystic; and 
that might be taken as the motto of all 
the noblest art in every age, greatest always 
in imperfection, conquering by failure; 
and like the symbol of it all, the Cross 
shining splendid out of the very stuff of 
misery. But this w^orld-embracing temper 
does not stop here. It goes through all 
things. The Christian may find in every 
wholesome human relation not only more 



136 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

delight but deeper meaning than anyone 
else. Earthly fatherhood is a nobler thing, 
because it is a shadow of the Divine, and 
human love glows more brightly when seen 
as a symbol of the joy that burns at the 
heart of things. It is not to the mere 
butterfly, but to the immortal spirit that 
the treasure house, even of this world, is 
open. He is a child in the stage of life, 
playing about and learning till he reach 
maturity. To him belongs the universe, 
past and present and to come, in a way 
that it cannot do to "the poor pensioner 
on the bounty of an hour." If we are 
not immortal, we may be possessed by 
the world, we cannot possess it; we are 
strangers, it is our enemy; we take a little 
and then are gone. If we are to go on, we 
can appropriate it, make it our own, so that 
its beauty and its sorrow, all its mystery 
and its splendid acts, become part of us 
and shine for ever in a spirit that lives with 
God. Even worldliness demands other- 
worldliness to justify it. Only the im- 
mortals have a right to feel at home in this 
world. We are like a boy at school or 
college who shares all his life, past, present, 



CALVARY 137 

and to come, and carries it on in the whole 
course of his career; we are to carry out 
the treasures of the spirit, for they are 
part of us; and so of us, and us alone, is it 
true, as S. Paul said, "All things are yours, 
whether Paul or Apollos, or life or death, 
or things present or things to come — 
all are yours and ye are Christ's and 
Christ is God's." 

We have thus considered the contrasted 
tempers, the Puritan and the Sacramental, 
as exhibited among Christians; let us 
compare them with the similar condition, 
as seen in others. Compare the world- 
renouncing attitude of some Christians 
with that of the Buddhists, or the Western 
pessimist who preaches a doctrine sub- 
stantially the same and treats individuality 
as evil. Such a Christian as the "exile 
on Babylon's strand" is, it is true, the 
stranger who laments "that earth is a 
desert drear" and looks to "heaven as his 
home." But he does all this not because 
he wants less, but because he wants more 
life, including his own. It is the imper- 
fection of the world taken even at its best 



138 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

that drives him to seek a "better country." 
He is like a child, who cannot play the 
games which commonly delight him, be- 
cause he is consumed with excitement over 
the feast to which he is going. The good 
has almost ceased to be a good because 
he knows there is something better in a 
short time; just as a thirsty man may 
refuse lemonade, if he has been told that 
champagne is on the way. 

The pessimist on the other hand declares 
life to be an evil quand meme and there 
can be no deliverance till it be extinguished. 
Hartmann and his followers can treat con- 
sciousness as an evil and look to the day 
when the universe, weary of its initial 
error, will swallow its tail — and all be 
done. The Christian says that life is a 
good thing, but has been marred by sin; 
and suffers also from the growing pains of 
youth. The one is like the new boy dream- 
ing of the day when he will bowl for the 
eleven, and sustaining himself by the dream 
when things are very unlike it. The other 
is the type which at the first onset of diffi- 
culty writes home and begs to be removed. 
Both these look forward to death; the one 



CALVARY 139 

because he thinks it "closes all," the other 
because he knows it does not. The fault 
of the one is impatience, petulance, the 
refusal of the sensitive artist to produce 
because he can never achieve his ideal; 
he is the man who loses all interest in his 
work as soon as he has planned his holiday. 
The other believes that things in them- 
selves are hopeless and the one goal anni- 
hilation. If either went to the practical 
extreme, the Christian would commit sui- 
cide from an unbalanced hope, from a 
desire to see the other side at once; the 
non-Christian would do so from an un- 
relieved despair, in order to be rid of an 
existence found intolerable. Christian pessi- 
mism is a pessimism secundum quid and 
treats this world as a purgatory. True 
pessimism is pessimism simpliciter and 
treats personal existence as hell. 

The same is true of the practical maxims 
that attach to the two types, the Christian 
and the non-Christian. No greater error 
has been made than that which confounds 
the Christian and the non-Christian doc- 
trine of self-sacrifice. Modern altruism 
teaches what is really a denial of individu- 



140 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

ality and tries to destroy "the will to live" 
by substituting "the will to love." The 
Gospel declares that a man must die to 
live, but it neither states nor implies the 
destruction of the self. All false asceticism 
finds its root in the non-Christian view of 
self-sacrifice; all true asceticism in the 
Christian. For it is the ground truth of 
all education; it is the earliest lesson of 
the schoolboy that pain must not only be 
faced, but transmuted through courage 
into joy and strength. It is the result of 
the truth that self can only find itself in 
love, and this involves surrender, giving, 
cost. This, however, does not mean that 
personality is annihilated, or that the 
individual is to be lost in a higher unity. 
On the contrary love, even in its most 
sacrificial forms, exalts and develops indi- 
viduality and strengthens the will. One 
argument for immortality is the difficulty 
of believing that certain characters aflame 
with love can be as though they never were. 
But it is not hard to hold such a creed about 
a very selfish man. 

I think that some of the animus displayed 
by Nietzsche against Christian ethics was 



CALVARY 141 

due to an error of this sort. He mistook 
Schopenhauer's doctrine of self-annihilation 
for Christian sacrifice; in a word he con- 
fused pessimistic with educational asceti- 
cism, and most of his attack is vitiated by 
this confusion. On the other hand it must 
be allowed that Christians of all schools 
have used and do use language about self- 
sacrifice which leads to misconception. 
Some apparently believe in a notion of 
sacrifice which teaches not the develop- 
ment of personality through self-giving, 
but its annihilation; and this really treats 
individuality as an evil. That at least 
is the logical import of their words, and it 
has led to disastrous consequences, harmful 
not only to health, but to morals. I think 
it is the fundamental error of the Jesuit 
system, for it is obvious that if complete 
sacrifice is demanded, the conscience must 
go too. 1 

Let us take now the counter tendency, 
the world-accepting, for that also exists 
on a non-Christian no less than on a Chris- 
tian foundation. Yet how different! By 
the Christian the life is accepted as God's 



142 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

will for him, a state of probation. This 
world is in all its details a sacrament, the 
outward and visible sign of an inward and 
spiritual grace. The beauty of nature and 
art, the acts of human work and play, 
friendship and heroism and forgiveness, 
all are noble, because they point beyond 
and are caught up in the life of a spirit that 
passes from earthly society to heavenly. 
As I said just now, they are worthy, but 
relatively and provisionally worthy, rather 
because of what they hint than of what 
they say. They are suggestions of eternity 
in statements of time. To the non-Chris- 
tian, however, they are all in all. He, to 
whom no further life is promised, may 
resolve to make the most of what there is, 
just because he has nothing more. He 
may accept the world as a place wherein 
to be as happy as he may and echo the 
Carpe diem philosophy of Horace and many 
another. 

"Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, 
Before ye too into the dust descend; 

Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie 
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and — sans end!" 



CALVARY 143 

The pessimism which underlies the voluptu- 
aries' philosophy patent in Omar is yet 
more shining in the well known epilogue 
of Walter Pater to the Renaissance. 
"Every moment some form grows perfect 
in hand or face; some tone on the hills 
or the sea is choicer than the rest; some 
mood of passion or insight or intellectual 
excitement is irresistibly real and attrac- 
tive for us, — for that moment only. Not 
the fruit of experience, but experience 
itself, is the end. A counted number of 
pulses only is given to us of a variegated 
dramatic life. How may we see in them 
all that is to be seen in them by the finest 
senses? How shall we pass most quickly 
from point to point, and be present always 
at the focus where the greatest number of 
vital forces unite in their purest energy? . . . 
11 While all melts under our feet, we may 
well catch at any exquisite passion, or any 
contribution to knowledge that seems by 
a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for 
a moment, or any stirring of the senses, 
strange dyes, strange colours, and curious 
odours, or work of the artist's hands, or 
the face of one's friend. Not to discrimin- 



144 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

ate every moment some passionate attitude 
in those about us and in the brilliancy of 
their gifts some tragic dividing of forces 
on their ways is, on this short day of 
frost and sun to sleep before evening. . . . 

"We are all condamnes as Victor Hugo 
says, we are all under sentence of death, 
but with a sort of indefinite reprieve — 
les hommes sont tout condamnes a mort mats 
avec des sursis indefinis — we have an 
interval and then our place knows us no 
more. Some spend this interval in listless- 
ness, some in high passions, the wisest, at 
least among the children of this world, 
in art and song. For our one chance lies 
in expanding that interval, in getting as 
many pulsations as possible into the given 
time/ 5 

True, the world-accepting temper is not 
tied to this Epicurean form. It may take 
on the austere tone of the Stoics or their 
modern imitators, the attitude familiar 
to most of us in Matthew Arnold's poems. 
Or again its votary may adopt the Positivist 
humanitarian attitude, a position curiously 
like one side of Christian ethics in the 
enthusiasm for humanity and sense of 



CALVARY 145 

social ties, and also in some practical views, 
such as those on marriage. At bottom, 
however, it is quite different, and though 
ennobled by high and earnest endeavour, 
is without that vein of hope and gaiety 
which clings to the Christian. With the 
burdens of the human race it has sympathy 
and enters into its toils and its sorrows, 
but this burden is to it a burden and nothing 
more. It has no Heavenly Father to trust 
to, and when disinterested must spend 
itself in a fever of activity in order to effect 
its purposes. It can never rest, for it has 
only itself to trust to. 

The truth is this. The doctrine of a 
world beyond, in which we ourselves shall 
have part, may be looked at in various ways 
and colours itself, according to our tempera- 
ment; yet in any case it changes all our 
values. Only the most superficial resem- 
blance is left between those who are Chris- 
tians and those who are not. Now at 
last are men coming to see this. They 
realize that whether the supernatural theory 
of the origin and nature of Church life be 

true or false, it is terrific, and that in this 
11 



146 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

respect there can be little doubt as to the 
belief of the earliest of Christians or the 
consciousness of their Master. We may 
indeed have to allow a good deal more for 
the way in which the doctrine was developed 
out of its seed, but of the supernatural, 
other-worldly claims of Jesus of Nazareth 
there can be no question. Indeed there 
never need have been, but for a small 
circle of pedants, who were anxious to 
retain the name and prestige of Christian, 
while rejecting every element that gave the 
Faith its power. All they held was a mere 
morality, but they wanted to dignify it 
with the name of religion. They desired 
the historic and traditional charm of the 
Christian Church, while repudiating every 
element which made that charm possible. 
Now, however, this school is breaking up 
under the pressure of mutual criticism, and 
the issue is daily clearer between those who 
accept Jesus Christ with His supernatural 
claim and those who, since they are unable 
to credit the claim, repudiate His leader- 
ship. The half-way house of German liber- 
alism is built on sands; the storm of the 
apocalyptic problem is shaking it in pieces. 



CALVARY 147 

To many, of course, this recognition makes 
belief harder; for they cannot delude 
themselves any longer into imagining they 
are Christians, when they are nothing of 
the sort. 

Dr. Schweitzer, in a memorable phrase, 
has declared that if Jesus Christ came into 
our modern world, He would come as a 
stranger; that our characteristic categories 
hold no place for Him; that the funda- 
mentally other-worldly claim, the apoca- 
lyptic vision of Jesus is opposed to the 
presuppositions of the ordinary educated 
man, formed as they are under the influence 
of naturalism. I believe that Dr. Schweitzer 
is right; that if Jesus came once more as an 
individual He would come not to bring 
peace but a sword, and that many who 
for sentimental reasons cling to His name 
would turn and cry "Crucify Him." I 
believe also that He is doing this here and 
now, through His body the Church, except 
where she is false to her mission; and that 
there is an irreconcilable conflict, not indeed 
between science and religion, but between 
scientific fatalism and the postulates of the 
Christian Faith. This conflict it is idle 



148 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

to ignore. It meets us at every stage and 
in every form. Idler yet is the attempt by 
the promoters of "reduced Christianity" 
to transform the "great mystery of godli- 
ness" into a decorated natural philosophy 
or a sentimental altruism. For the essence 
of the Faith is to be spiritual, personal, 
supernatural, and it may not be reconciled 
with any rationalistically designed scheme 
of the universe. Yet it is congruous with 
life as it is lived daily in this world; with 
the dreams and "obstinate questions" of 
the child; with the "long long thoughts" 
of the youth; with the passion and adven- 
ture of the man, and with all the incurably 
social instincts of the race. 

So far as I have understood him, 
Dr. Schweitzer himself is convinced of the 
adequacy of our modern categories and 
thinks them a fit criterion whereby to 
judge the Saviour of the world. Having 
shewn that the Jesus of the Gospels is not 
the Christ of modern Protestantism, and 
descanted on His supernatural apocalyptic 
claim, he turns away, treating Him as 
mere man with a turn for vision. That, 
at any rate, is one alternative (whether or 



CALVARY 149 

no it is that adopted by Dr. Schweitzer). 
You may believe that the apocalyptic Jesus 
is nearer to the truth of history than any 
other, and on that very ground you may 
be unable to credit His claims, and are 
therefore driven to decline all connection 
with historical Christianity. George Tyrrell 
has shewn how the apocalyptic theory 
leads straight on to a transcendent view 
of Jesus, and the situation has been well 
summed up by a Cambridge scholar. 

"Once more we are driven to ask, Who 
is this mysterious Person of the irrecon- 
cilable contrasts, who had not where to 
lay His Head, and who claimed all power 
in Heaven and earth? Who, we are told, 
belonged so completely to His own age 
that he is a stranger and enigma to our 
time, and yet men think of Him, talk of 
Him, worship Him, and find their truest 
life in following Him? Who lived on earth, 
they tell us, the life of a deluded visionary, 
finding out His mistakes on a felon's cross, 
and yet, the same writer tells us, c a mighty 
spiritual force streams forth from Him 
and flows through our time also'? Who, 
as the same author goes on to declare, 



150 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

'in the light of historical inquiry passes 
our time and returns to His own'? And 
yet the champion of this new attempt to 
explain the mystery of His personality 
has given up his life of teaching and study 
at Strasburg to be trained as a medical 
missionary for work on the Congo, and has 
now been accepted by the French Mis- 
sionary Society for that purpose, and is, 
I believe, soon to go out, to fight, as he 
puts it, 'for the lordship and rule of Jesus 
over this world.' Whatever judgment we 
may pass on Dr. Schweitzer's book and 
theories, let us make up our minds in the 
light of these facts. Once more he has 
forced upon us, by what he has written 
and by what he wants to do, the question 
of the Jerusalem crowd, Who is this? We 
may learn part of the answer to the question 
from the closing words of his book. "Jesus 
comes to us as One unknown, without a 
name, as of old by the lakeside He came 
to those who knew Him not; He speaks 
to us the same words, "Follow Me," and 
sets us the tasks which He has to fulfil for 
our time. He commands. And to those 
who obey Him, whether they be wise or 



CALVARY 151 

simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, 
the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall 
pass through in His fellowship, and as an 
ineffable mystery they shall learn in their 
own experience who He is/" 

A movement somewhat similar is repre- 
sented by men such as Professor Drews, 
and in a less degree Professor Jensen, 
abroad, and less important folk in England, 
like Mr. J. M. Robertson and Mr. Roberts, 
and in this country by Professor W. B. 
Smith. These men 2 have all convinced 
themselves a priori of the impossibility 
of any supernatural events. At the same 
time they reject the "Liberal" view that 
the miraculous and transcendental elements 
in the story are of a later creation, and 
that the figure of Jesus as a pure and dis- 
interested social reformer can be disengaged 
from this supernatural trapping and made 
a mark, if not for faith, at least for admira- 
tion. Such men see plainly that this is 
impossible; the Gospel narratives, the 
Epistles of S. Paul, which reflect the 
earliest personal experience, the whole at- 
mosphere of the early Church as displayed 



152 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

in the New Testament and in our earliest 
independent knowledge, are saturated with 
the miraculous. The supernatural is so 
much an integral part of the picture that 
it is vain to cut out all these elements as 
unhistorical and treat what is left, after 
this gigantic subtraction, as the fact. The 
whole of the narratives must go by the 
board if we may not believe in the irruption 
of the Divine into this world at a definite 
time. Consequently the whole evidence 
does go by the board. They are devoting 
their energies with much ingenuity to shew 
that the whole story of Jesus, however 
attenuated, has no warrant in fact; that 
the person is simply the eponymous hero 
of a cult which has gathered round the 
Eucharistic meal. A mild expression of 
this tendency can be seen in the words of 
the Rev. Dr. Cheyne. 

"That the God-man, w T hose cult in cer- 
tain Jewish circles was probably pre-Chris- 
tian was called by a name which underlies 
Joshua, has become to me, on grounds of 
my own, very possible, and it is to me 
much more than merely possible that Jesus 
of Nazareth was not betrayed or surren- 



CALVARY 153 

dered to the Jewish authorities, whether 
by Judas or by anyone else. The € Twelve 
Apostles' too are to me (and I should 
think to many critics) as unhistorical as 
the seventy disciples." 3 

Such speculations may seem sufficiently 
absurd. But these words of ex-Canon 
Cheyne shew that they are not to be 
ignored by the most eminent critics, and 
that the advanced school of learned criti- 
cism has much affinity with such views. 
It is very natural. Once grant the postu- 
lates on which they rest — and most of 
the German "Liberals" do grant these 
postulates — and the conclusions of Drews 
are far less absurd than the attempt of the 
normal Teutonic savant to reduce the life 
of Jesus and the experience of the Church 
to the level of the ordinary events of their 
own machine-governed lives. All these peo- 
ple seem destitute of one sense; they are 
like the senior wrangler who asked what 
'Paradise Lost' was written to prove. 

The problem offered by the apocalyptic 
school, led by Dr. Schweitzer, and by the 
mythological school as led by men like 
Professor Drews, has not been faced by 



154 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

the advocates of the commonplace and 
Philistine projection of the Gospel figure 
fashionable in circles of soi-disant enlight- 
enment and set forth in unadorned sterility 
by the Dean of Divinity at Magdalen 
College, Oxford. The point is not whether 
such views are true — they are obviously 
nonsense — but whether they are not the 
logical outcome of these same preposses- 
sions, which cause the excision of all 
the wonderful features from the figure 
of Christ and the history of the Church. 
"Reduced Christianity/' as it is called, 
is but a half-way house. You cannot rest 
in it, but must move either backward or 
forward. Either you must surrender any- 
thing beyond the merest humanitarian 
notion of our Lord; in which case you will 
not improbably be driven further and 
eventually, like the protagonist in the 
"Jesus as Christ" controversy, give up all 
belief even in His historicity; or at any 
rate you will find it more and more impos- 
sible to maintain any real belief in His 
uniqueness. 

Dr. Harnack, for instance, is for cutting 
away most of the transcendent elements, 



CALVARY 155 

while still maintaining His unique relation 
to the Father — a doctrine which really 
surrenders the notion of history as a mere 
continuing and makes miracles possible- 
It admits a "creative evolution." It is 
doubtful whether this view can be sustained. 
The whole movement of the Christian 
Church may be a delusion, and then we 
are all in the dark, except that the dark- 
ness has been made visible by the pathetic 
splendour of Christianity. For, as Mr. 
Montefiore says, the Liberal Protestant 
view of our Lord really is a justification 
of the Jewish people, who crucified Him 
for His claims; and it is to that Judaistic 
theism that those must return who are 
so deeply wedded to the modern super- 
stitions of law and continuity that the 
exceptional, the unique, the really new 
event or person is to them inconceivable. 
If on the other hand you accept the lordship 
of Jesus as a mysterious being, with some- 
thing in Him more than human, you will 
be carried, however reluctantly, to the 
Christ of the Creeds and the New Testa- 
ment and the whole supernatural faith in 
a Church dispensing gifts of God's grace 



156 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

and guided by a power not of this world. 
This also you will do, unless you are so 
deeply convinced of what can not happen 
that you remain unmoved by the accumu- 
lated weight of evidence, historic, social, 
personal, which points to a transcendental 
interpretation of these strange facts in the 
world's experience. 

What I want to emphasize is, that 
here is the dividing line, and we must 
make our choice. Christianity may be true 
or false, but it makes claims subversive of 
all the rationalist projections of life. It 
rests on presuppositions which cannot by 
any ingenuity be reconciled with any view 
which denies the miraculous, the unique, 
the individual. Its whole meaning comes 
from a faith in a life of spirits behind the 
veil. It cannot without hopeless error be 
confused with those systems which deny 
such a life or treat it as impersonal. You 
cannot treat existence as a closed circle, 
with every part predetermined, and at the 
same time assert the reality of freedom and 
the guilt of sin. You cannot place the same 
value, as others do, upon human life on 
earth, if you hold that life to be but an 



CALVARY 157 

episode in a career which passes far beyond 
earth. This world is a different place 
according as it be viewed from the Christian 
or the non-Christian standpoint, and no 
ethical or personal sympathy can bridge 
the gulf. 

A very cursory perusal of the New Testa- 
ment ought soon to convince even the most 
pronounced Liberal that, even allowing 
for differences of date and expression, the 
experience therein recorded is something 
other than that contemplated by their 
system. It is above all things of a "new 
life," a vast change, that the writers speak, 
and it always has reference to the world 
beyond. Take the most characteristic 
phrases of S. Paul, such as that of being 
"buried with Christ in baptism"; that 
"Christians are dead and their life hid 
with Christ in God"; that he is "crucified 
with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I 
but Christ liveth in me." These might 
conceivably be paralleled in non-Christian 
mystical writings, but that of itself points 
to the other world and is far removed from 
the drab Philistinism of the Liberal. Its 
very meaning is the unity between the 



158 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

individual and the all; the flight of "the 
alone to the alone." 

Or take the phrases about the peace pur- 
chased with the blood of Christ. They 
are quite as startling, or even vulgar some 
might say, as hymns like Cowper's "There 
is a fountain filled with blood. " The cry 
of an untaught Methodist, the "blood and 
fire " of the Salvation Army, the best Eng- 
lish form of devotion to the Sacred Heart, 
are one and all nearer to the mind of the 
New Testament writers, to S. Paul, and S. 
Peter, and S. John, and above all to the 
Epistles to the Hebrews, than are the 
ethical commonplaces of Unitarian or semi- 
Unitarian Christianity. I suppose this ele- 
ment of strangeness and unorthodoxy would 
be admitted in the writings attributed to 
S. John, but discounted. As a matter of 
fact it is of little importance for our purpose 
here who wrote them. They certainly 
represent a state of mind that existed in the 
Church quite early. Of that transcen- 
dental, other-worldly conception of Jesus 
as existing in the Church they are first- 
hand evidence, no less than the Epistles 
to the Ephesians or the Colossians. Turn 



CALVARY 159 

the New Testament inside out, dissect it 
as you may, and you cannot read it for 
ten minutes without coming across flashes 
of this sort side by side often with the most 
matter-of-fact maxims for the conduct of 
parents and children, wives and slaves and 
citizens. One unique feature of the New 
Testament is the interpenetration of the 
plainest moral precepts with the most 
exalted mystical ecstasy. 

Finally is there not in the central figure 
itself, despite all this simplicity, something 
strange and elusive? There is, it might 
almost be said, a certain absent-minded- 
ness in the utterances of Jesus; and while 
He lives the life of a Jew, the words which 
at one time caused many so much ponder- 
ing would seem expressive of His habitual 
way. It is not a character easy to be 
described, and His life in the wider sense 
could not be written. Impressionist por- 
traiture was all that was possible, and 
that is what we have. It is incomplete, 
unchronological, unscientific, if you will; 
but the impression is always the same, 
the weird mingling of the homely and 
the far-off, the strange romantic tender- 



160 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

ness for things human and little, the 
passion of faith; and the unbroken calm all 
intertwined with that power to do things, 
to make wonders, leaves us, as it left his 
earliest friends, in suspense. "What man- 
ner of man is this?" Stranger, as Dr. 
Schweitzer calls him, to our age, He was 
strange to His own, so strange that men 
were driven either to crucify Him or else 
to take up the Cross themselves. 

I trust that these instances do not weary 
you. For further confirmation I would refer 
to the New Testament. I am convinced 
that it is only because people insist on dis- 
cussing religion, who are ignorant of the 
Bible, that it is ever thought feasible to 
present Christianity as a merely human 
religion, while still maintaining it to be 
Christianity. People will read philosophy, 
theology, criticism, anything rather than the 
Bible, and then they wonder why the system 
of the Church is so unintelligible. I confess 
it myself. It is only these last few years 
that I have, as it were, rediscovered the 
New Testament; and the more I study it, 
not critically but devotionally, the more 
does the choice it leaves seem clear to me. 
Either this thing is a delusion the most 



CALVARY 161 

gigantic the world has known, or else it is 
a revelation from beyond, a gift of grace, 
something that we could not have done for 
ourselves. Either it is what it claims, the 
power of God able to save to the utter- 
most and giving peace and freedom, or 
it is a quack medicine; this conclusion is 
vouched for alike by its earliest records, 
by the history of the Church, and by the 
experience of the individual Christian to- 
day, from Papist to Plymouth brother. All 
believe themselves to have hold of a new 
supernatural life, to be sustained by forces 
not their own, to be in touch with One, 
of Whom however little we know, we know 
enough to enter into communion with Him; 
and that He can give us of Himself. This 
He has done by the medium of His Son, 
the very brightness of His glory, and that 
Son not only shews us the Father, but 
in some way beyond our ken has bought 
for us deliverance from death by His 
great act on the Cross; so that who- 
soever believeth in Him shall not perish, 
but have Eternal Life. In other words, 
Christianity is supernatural, or it is a 

sham. 
12 



162 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

But what do you mean by the super- 
natural? And what right have you to 
use the term? These are questions cer- 
tain to be put. It has recently become 
the fashion to deprecate the use of the 
term supernatural; to declare that the 
spiritual significance of nature is so real, 
and the consecration of our ordinary life so 
needful, that to use this term arouses 
needless hostility and leads to a low view 
of human duty. Carlyle used to declare, 
"The natural is the supernatural." Do 
not all Christians hold to the Omnipresence 
of God? That means His Immanence in 
all His works, and so far from honouring 
God, we are profaning Him by shutting 
Him off into one separate part called super- 
natural. I think that this objection is 
groundless, and that the disuse of the term 
leads to grave dangers in the direction of 
Pantheism, dangers which we have not 
altogether escaped. It is partly, of course, 
a matter of definition. If, as Huxley said 
somewhere, nature is taken for simply the 
universe of being, it is quite clear that the 
natural is the supernatural; it is indeed a 
truism. Nobody asserts that miracles are 



CALVARY 163 

against the nature of things; if by nature 
we mean all that happens, as Mill put it, 
of course they are natural events. Only 
as a fact people do not mean that when 
they speak of nature. They mean this 
physical visible world. The question is not 
whether this world has a spiritual significance, 
but whether it is all or only a part of the whole. 
The least misleading way of asserting that 
there is, in addition to this world, a larger 
invisible world behind it, with other powers 
than we possess, is, to my judgment, to 
make use of this derided term supernatural. 
But of course it must be remembered that, 
taking the universe as a whole, events such 
as the birth of Christ are natural, miracles 
are normal, all is according to order; but 
it is the nature, the law, and the order of 
the whole, and of that whole we have here 
but a tiny part. 

On this point and on some others touched 
on in this book, the reader will do well to 
consult an admirable article by Miss Carter 
Sturge in The Commonwealth for September, 
1909. It is in the form of a review of Mr. 
Dearmer's book on Body and Soul, but it 
deals with topics of wider interest* I wish 



164 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

that it could be reprinted. Failing that, 
I quote the following. 

"Nevertheless, perhaps, in his recogni- 
tion of the essential Unity of Matter and 
Mind, it is possible that the author some- 
what loses sight of the difference of planes 
in which the Creator manifests Himself 
when he comes to the question of miracles. 
He speaks, and in a sense rightly, of the 
'naturalness of miracles/ If 'naturalness' 
is held to be equivalent to processes carried 
on in obedience to law, laws whether 
spiritual, psychic, or physical, then the 
expression is true. But as a matter of 
fact we generally understand by natural 
the workings of the laws of the physical 
plane, which we call the world of Nature, 
and which works according to laws of its 
own, laws which we are learning to know 
with great exactitude and on which we can 
calculate with increasing certainty so long 
as (there is the point) they are not inter- 
fered with or counteracted by the higher 
laws of another plane. But surely it is 
the bringing into play of another order of 
laws so to speak, laws which usually have 
little touch with this plane, which constitutes 



CALVARY 165 

miracle. If miracles were natural in the 
sense which we ordinarily understand by 
the word, we should not have witnessed the 
almost passionate effort on the part of 
scientific men in the generation just passed 
to get rid of them as things contrary to 
nature and impossible. There must be 
some very marked distinction between the 
1 works' and 'powers' spoken of as miracles 
(amounting almost to a difference in kind) 
and the ordinary facts of nature or they 
would not have produced such intense 
incredulity in scientific students of nature. 
And in so far as they are not according to 
the so-called laws of nature, even markedly 
upsetting these, they can truly be spoken of 
as supernatural, coming from a plane lying 
deeper than our known world of natural 
phenomena. And we shall have greatly 
to alter the connotation of 'natural' if we 
are to make it cover these laws of a more 
mental or spiritual plane. It is true that 
there is evidence that these higher laws are 
likely in the future to play a far more 
important part in our life on this plane, 
and that by familiarity with them they may 
cease to seem marvellous; yet there still 



166 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

will be the two distinct sets of laws, distinct 
from each other, the physical and the 
superphysical, although related of course 
in a Unity as all emanating from the 
Creator. ... It is best to avoid confusion 
and to recognise that we are so constituted 
as to have, if we will live up to our inheri- 
tance, more or less, the command of the 
laws of at least two planes and possibly 
more." 4 

Again, under the influence of idealism, 
the natural has been alleged to be the super- 
natural, in as much as its whole meaning, 
its bulk, is spiritual. Such a view no Chris- 
tian is concerned to deny; God is the 
ground of the material universe and its 
laws are His will. Yet again it seems to 
me in its practical import misleading and 
dangerous. For it almost irresistibly tends 
to identify God with the world and to lead 
right on to Pantheism. At least it favours 
the view that God is not above, but im- 
plicated in the course of nature; that He 
cannot break the routine of a natural evo- 
lution, operating in fixed ways known to 
science. 

Nature from this standpoint always tends 



CALVARY 167 

to mean "nature as she appears to man 
from a certain point of view — i.e., from 
the standpoint of mechanical causation 5 '; 
if this is not asserted it is always implied. 5 
It leads further to the view that the whole 
universe is one in such a way that, though 
that oneness be spiritual, in it there can 
be no true individuality, no freedom, and 
nothing like the Gospel drama of the soul. 
These things have a certain relative value, 
but they cannot be the saving Truth men 
used to think them. I do not say that 
all who object to the term supernatural 
hold this. But I think that the logical 
implication of their thought is in this direc- 
tion, and that many find therein the main 
stumbling block to Faith. It is against 
such views that supernatural is in its right 
place, as the epithet distinctive of Chris- 
tianity. No Christian need deny the 
spiritual significance of matter or assert 
that the physical world is to be explained 
apart from God. Rather he asserts the 
contrary. But he must assert that God is 
very much more than the soul of the world; 
it is His work, not merely His garment. 
He is as much and more beyond it as I, 



168 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

in my personality, am beyond the body 
which is the instrument of my life here. 
It is sometimes said that this distinction 
between nature and the supernatural is 
harmful because it secularises the greater 
part of life. But, as a fact, to give up the 
distinction tends in the long run to secu- 
larise the whole of it. By saying that no 
day is specially sacred, you will not make 
the ordinary man keep all days as the 
Lord's; rather he will more and more shut 
God out of his life. Prayer is possible at 
any time and at all occupations, but the 
man who prays when he is cleaning his 
boots is always likely to be the man who 
has set apart times to keep up the habit. 
It is so through all this range of distinctions, 
those between sacred and secular, Sunday 
and weekday, clergy and laity, the Church 
and the world, venial and mortal sins. All 
of them are relative, not absolute. To 
press any to an extreme is dangerous. But 
to leave them out is more dangerous still. 
Human nature being what it is, you tend 
to banish God altogether if you say that 
because He is omnipresent there are to 
be no sacred places or seasons. While if 



CALVARY 169 

you assert that all sins are equal, though 
in one sense it is true, you will make the 
ordinary man treat all sin as venial and 
none as serious, A great deal of the 
current laxity in regard to sin has come from 
the omission to make use of a distinction 
between mortal and venial sin, which is 
only approximately true. We have fallen 
in consequence into the worse error of 
treating sin as unimportant. 

The supreme danger, however, of this 
dislike of the idea of the supernatural is 
that in so far as it is not hostile to religion 
it ministers to a fashionable Pantheism, 
which in the long run condones the most 
revolting acts, because somehow or other 
they are part of God's world. In the past 
generation men have given in a little too 
much to this habit of thought. We have 
passed through an age best termed Alex- 
andrian, when men have been concerned to 
shew the assimilations between Christian 
and other systems and have almost forgot- 
ten the difference in the process. So much 
alive have they been to the human environ- 
ment that they have neglected to emphasize 
the divine origin of the Gospel. Now, it 



170 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

seems, we need rather a Tertullianist or 
Augustinian presentment of the faith insist- 
ing more on its difference from, than its 
approximation to, other systems; on the 
vital change it brought, rather than on the 
connection, however undoubted, with the 
old; on the gift of a new life, that makes it 
what it is. Both sides are true; what 
might be roughly called the Greek, or the 
Johannine view of things, and the Latin or 
the Pauline ; at this moment it is the latter 
that we need to bring into relief. 

As I have tried to shew, it is these unique, 
incommunicable, other-worldly elements 
that make the beauty of the Christian 
Faith, even though it be false. These it is 
which give it its own aroma. To cut out 
of it all miracle because it is improbable, 
the doctrine of the Incarnation because it 
is mysterious, the glory of sins forgiven 
because it is hard to rationalise, all this 
would be to cut out what is of real charm 
in the Christian, as distinct from other 
systems; while it seems to me that those 
who are for this drastic treatment are 
attaching a certainty and infallibility to 
some modern habits of thought which they 



CALVARY 171 

do not possess even in regard to normal 
human life, and are still less likely to pos- 
sess in regard to any revelation from unseen 
powers. The assumption at the basis of 
George Tyrrell's Christianity at the Cross 
Roads seems to be that wherever Christi- 
anity conflicts with our modern mental 
scheme, it must be trimmed to make the 
two square. This view seems to be quite 
without ground. Neither facts nor theory 
justify our holding the dogma of the infalli- 
bility of the modern Western mind. Its 
most acute representatives do not claim 
this infallibility, and the intellectual an- 
archy of our day reveals its inadequacy. 
Most of all, however, is its limitation 
displayed in the amazing lack of certain 
elements of noble living, which are found 
in civilisations whose spirit is different. 
It lays stress on one set of qualities and 
ignores others, and the result is mon- 
strosity. It is precisely because the Chris- 
tian Faith does involve these other elements, 
because it demands a mental habit different 
from that now popular, that it is at least 
arresting. True or false, its sincere pro- 
fession sets us free from the idols of our 



172 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

modern cave and permits us to look at 
God's universe with the eyes of the peni- 
tent, the lover, and the child. To take 
from the Christian Faith the elements that 
make this possible is to destroy its inalien- 
able charm and remove from it its main 
source of attraction, as compared with 
other schemes austere, imposing, and phil- 
osophical though they be, 

I think then that we do right in empha- 
sizing the uniqueness of the Christian claim 
and insisting on the wisdom of the use of 
the word supernatural. But it is also true 
that there is a very important sense, in 
which the natural is the supernatural, and 
that our whole problem turns on this truth. 
The real question between Christianity and 
its adversaries is concerned not with the 
miracles of Jesus, but with the possibility 
of human freedom. The antecedent diffi- 
culty which keeps men from Christian 
Faith is commonly understood to be this 
problem of the miraculous. This is true, 
but it is true only because miracles are a 
part of the larger issue between freedom 
and necessity. All along the line there is 



CALVARY 173 

one and only one fundamental difficulty, 
that created by "scientific fatalism.' ' It is 
clear that without some doctrine of human 
freedom the Christian scheme and the 
whole theory of -sin and redemption is 
nonsense. What is less obvious is that 
once it be established that the acts of men 
are not all of them determined, the a priori 
argument against miracles is gone. Suppos- 
ing our wills be free, we are spirits who 
choose and, acting frequently upon the 
material of nature, alter and interfere with 
its arrangements. We make that happen 
which apart from our free act would not 
happen. A miracle only asserts the same 
about a being or beings also free and with 
wider knowledge than ours. When God 
employs the forces of nature without any 
apparent interference, we call His act a 
special providence; when He brings forces 
into play which we cannot manipulate, we 
call the act a miracle. Both are equally 
involved in the conception of God's free- 
dom, that is His personality. Both are 
equally opposed to the mechanical theory 
of the world and are apt to be laughed out 
of court. If there be a spirit world besides 



174 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

man at all, we can hardly suppose that the 
beings within it are not possessed of wider 
knowledge than ours, and they will produce 
effects more startling. The whole problem 
turns on the reality of freedom, for that 
involves even in ourselves powers which 
may well be called supernatural. It is 
of course conceivable that there are no 
higher beings in the universe than we are. 
If that were so, of course miracles in the 
ordinary sense could not happen. But 
once grant that God is to be thought of as 
the free Being who created and controlled 
the world, then it is really less difficult to 
credit His action than our own; for we 
know very well that our life is dependent. 
Once grant, however, that our acts are free, 
or some of them, and the whole edifice of 
a system of rigid mechanism falls to the 
ground ; and we must, at least, allow the pos- 
sibility of such irruptions from the world 
beyond sight as are best called miraculous. 
On this matter of freedom it is needless 
to dwell at length. The problem is as old 
as thought. Moreover, one of the clearest 
defences of human freedom has been made, 
in this place, by William James. 6 



CALVARY 175 

This much, however, I would say. Free- 
dom, not of all but of some actions, is to 
me an immediate doctrine of consciousness, 
a primary fact, the most real thing in life. 
So much is it a part of my life that to deny 
this fact reduces it to ruins. As Dr. 
Pringle-Pattison says, "Inexplicable in a 
sense as man's personal agency is — the 
one perpetual miracle — it is neverthe- 
less our overt datum and our only clue to 
the mystery of existence." 7 I find further 
that in practice this belief is the foundation 
of social life, is assumed in every personal 
judgment; and however they may explain 
it in theory, all men make it in practice 
the presupposition of their mutual inter- 
course. So far then as I am concerned, 
if I had to choose, I would prefer the belief 
that there is something radically inadequate 
in human reasoning if, as apparently it 
does, it leads to determinism; I should prefer 
this alternative to the acceptance of deter- 
minism. For there may be this error. 
It is a pure act of faith that you can get a 
rationalistically arranged scheme of things. 
The facts of life are there, whether we can 
harmonise them by reason or any other 



176 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

faculty. We do direct and restrain our 
actions. That we know, if we know any- 
thing. And to substitute any intellec- 
tualist scheme, however apparently secure, 
for what is to me the prius of all thinking, 
the knowledge of freedom, seems to me to 
put the cart before the horse and to be 
denying facts in deference to a constructive 
theory which may be false. Probably, 
indeed, as Bergson says, this notion of 
freedom is absolute and cannot be analyzed. 
The moment you begin to argue about it, 
you have really conceded the point to your 
adversary. Freedom must be accepted as 
a given fact, mysterious like the primary 
facts of life. In all there is something 
unfathomable, an "irreducible surd." Yet 
so far as observation goes, it is true to say 
that we live in a world of free beings 
standing "free and doubtful as at the cross 
roads in a forest." So far from the future 
being predictable, the daily and hourly 
experience of every man, woman, and child 
alive is expressed in the maxim of William 
the Waiter, "You never can tell, Sir, you 
never can tell." Part of life may obviously 
be made subject to calculation, and of 



CALVARY 177 

another part you can say what will probably 
occur, and in much more you can state 
that one of two things is more than probable. 
More than that you cannot do. And every 
attempt to do more breaks down in face of 
the amazing uncertainty of life. 

Once let the fact of freedom be granted, 
and it may be said that we live, here and 
now, a life which is truly described as 
supernatural. For in that case we our- 
selves are something more than parts of 
nature. Moreover, if as a fact there are 
a number of different centres of indeter- 
mination, the whole intellectualist scheme 
of the universe has broken down, because 
it is only the projection into mental terms 
of notions of mechanical necessity. Reality 
is now seen to be of such a nature that you 
cannot do more than predict what will 
happen in the physical world, provided 
certain disturbing causes, such as the free 
will of spiritual beings, do not operate; 
while the element of possible changes is 
much greater if you postulate a God who 
is free; i.e., personal and all-knowing. 
The real battle then in regard to miracles 
is that which ranges round the personality 

13 



178 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

of man and of God. Both hang together. 
Personalism — the doctrine of the universe 
as a world of spirits — is the point at issue 
in all the discussions. Pantheism is a 
creed the very opposite of this; it begins 
by denying human personality, it ends by 
denying Divine. More and more is it be- 
come clear that the battle of the future is 
one between some form or other of cosmic 
emotion which sacrifices all real distinctions 
in the desire to attain an all-embracing 
unity and Christianity with its insistence 
on the reality of the individual life of men 
and the personal being of God. Belief in 
Christ is increasingly recognised by our 
opponents as the great obstacle to the 
prevalence of Pantheistic monism. The 
reason is that the life of Jesus is the supreme 
revelation of the personal love of God, while 
His death and rising again are the assurance 
to all men of their value in God's sight 
and their participation not as means only, 
but as ends in the life of the world. 



LECTURE IV 

SION OR THE CHRISTIAN FACT 

Last summer, if you met a casual acquaint- 
ance come home from his holidays, what 
was the scene he was most likely to have 
visited? One of those macadamized cities, 
the flower of our civilisation? I think not. 
Perhaps he sought communion with nature 
in quiet places and refreshed his mind by 
rustic pursuits; or perhaps he climbed 
peaks or emulated the toils of Ulysses. 
One tribute, however, was paid by most of 
those who had the means. Away from 
the roar of wheels and heedless of our 
pleasures, there lies an obscure village in a 
backward country off the highway of the 
tourist. To Ober-Ammergau came men 
and women of every faith, there to watch 
in awe the drama of the Cross or weep at 
the parting of Mary and her Son. Unlured 
by luxuries they went on this quest, and 

179 



180 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

no star singer or artist attracted them. It 
was just a few villagers trained from youth 
up to this great act, but not otherwise 
differing from Bavarian peasants. 

What is the ground of this interest? It 
does not indeed prove so much as a pil- 
grimage to Our Lady of Walsingham in 
the Middle Ages, or that made memorable 
by Chaucer to the shrine of the poor man's 
Archbishop who dared to withstand a 
monarch more powerful than the Kaiser. 
For modern science has made the rough 
places plain to the traveller, while the act 
which formerly was one of devotion is now 
largely due to curiosity. For all that, this 
interest is worthy of remark in an age when, 
according to Thomas Hardy, a settled 
melancholy is coming over the educated 
classes with the decline of the belief in a 
beneficent power, and when by universal 
agreement ideals essentially Pagan have 
hold of numbers of educated people. How 
is it that the story of the Passion holds 
still so conquering a charm? You would 
not have secured a tithe of that company 
for the pictured presentment of the death 
of any other religious teacher — not even 



SION 181 

Mrs. Baker Eddy. It is strange what an 
attraction the Christian Church still pos- 
sesses even for men who scorn her claims. 
Privately people may reject and attack these 
claims and in public laugh to scorn all 
Christian ideals, yet the moment they 
m^ve one step in the pursuit of romance, 
they are forced to acknowledge and even 
to learn from her. It is curious to see in the 
houses of people to whom the Catholic 
Church is anathema copies of altar pieces 
and madonnas. Even more amazing it is 
to watch the struggles of non-Christian 
artists and poets to get away from this 
atmosphere. But the moment they drop 
into romance, it comes back to them. 
Agnostics will fill their holidays with visits 
to S. Ambrogio or S. Mark's and wax learned 
over the date or constitution of some 
monastic house, while they would cut off 
their right hand rather than give credence 
to those things which alone made such 
places possible. Human culture, so far as 
it looks before and after and seeks to bring 
men into the society of "the best that is 
known and thought in the world," is inex- 
tricably entangled with the Christian 



182 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

tradition. In consequence you now find 
intransigeants like John Davidson, the 
poet, opposed to all culture, as the only 
means of finally cutting off the entail of 
religion. Others make what is perhaps a 
worse error and confuse an aesthetic interest 
in stained glass or Church embroidery with 
a living faith. 

Now what makes possible such a spectacle 
as that at Ober-Ammergau? Not money. 
Millionaires all the world over might club 
together, but they could not produce a 
Passion-Play. It is no case of the demand 
creating the supply. This thing so touch- 
ing and wonderful could never have been 
at all, and would long since have died but 
for the faith of those who produce it. To 
these poor peasants, so inferior to our en- 
lightenment, this wonder is real. It belongs 
to their life as Christians. Their act is 
solid with that on Calvary. 

There is the fact of which we seek the 
interpretation — that tremendous event and 
its continuing influence in the life of society 
and the individual. We cannot separate 
these things. If we are to arrive at any 
satisfying estimate, we have to take all 



SION 183 

three as part of one great fact: the life, 
death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, 
the society in which His spirit acts, and the 
present reality of His gifts in individual 
experience. We must start from the actual 
phenomenon of today, the individual Chris- 
tian, who is what he is as sharer in the com- 
mon life of the Church; and this common 
life is continuous with the events of Calvary 
and the first Easter and may not be compre- 
hended apart from them; and vice versa. 
Of any event the evidence is to be sought 
in the effects which it produces (and this 
is the case even with the testimony of eye- 
witnesses). The Resurrection is no excep- 
tion to this law. Part of its evidence is to 
be sought in that collection of documents 
we call the New Testament. But this is 
only part. Other parts are the history 
of the Church and its living power in the 
experience of men and women today. 

Of these facts all symbolised in the 
Passion-Play there are, roughly speaking, 
two interpretations and two only. Accord- 
ing to the former, religion is a phenomenon 
well-nigh universal. It breaks out in Pro- 



184 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

tean forms, but all are purely human. To 
such a view the emergence of the Christian 
Faith, its victory, and its present efficacy 
form merely the cardinal instance of this 
universal phenomenon. It has no special 
or unique value, owes much to local and 
partial influences, and though possibly the 
highest form which the religious instinct 
has yet assumed, is not final and is likely to 
be superseded — is, indeed, already vanish- 
ing. Whatever substratum of fact under- 
lies the Evangelical narrative, and it is 
not large, there must have been enough to 
arrest and stimulate the imagination of 
mankind. 

Moreover, as Gibbon long since pointed 
out in his famous sixteenth chapter, there 
were other circumstances peculiarly favour- 
able to the growth of a society claiming 
supernatural credentials and assuring to 
any man a life beyond. Slowly and after 
many conflicts that society gathered co- 
hesion, and conquering all rivals such as 
the cult of Mithra or Neoplatonism, came 
at last to dominate the civilised world. 
That predominance, more than half tem- 
poral, was shattered by the Renaissance 



SION 185 

and the Reformation. True, the Christian 
Church still lives on. But it is only a 
living power in small groups. Some of 
its apparent strength is due to its inherited 
wealth and to the general lack of higher 
education. All this, however, is but for 
the moment. We are at the beginning of 
the end. Either the Christian Church will 
lighten the ship of its Jonah burden of the 
supernatural and live on as a frankly human 
institution, or it will be superseded by some 
fresh religious synthesis. Such a synthesis 
would not repudiate the Divine, but would 
rigidly exclude all notions of God, as dis- 
tinct from the developing life of nature, 
including men. Its horizons would be lim- 
ited by this world. It would make a more 
universal appeal than the Christian Faith, 
because its claims would be less startling; 
and no man who looks for the improvement 
of the race would find himself excluded 
from it. 

The naturalistic theory of Christianity 
takes on different colours with the tempera- 
ment of the speaker. From the hysterical 
contempt of Nietzsche, the hostility of 
writers like Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Sturt, 



186 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

we may pass through almost every stage 
of increasing admiration, with one great 
proviso, that Jesus is not to be worshipped 
as God. Even among those who adhere 
to the Christian name there are some who 
treat Him as little more than the first of 
human teachers, while the more extreme 
modernists openly avow that it is only the 
ideas of Christianity that matter, and that 
it is of no importance whether any of the 
alleged facts, supernatural or not, happened 
at all. We are to rest in an "imaginary 
portrait" and rejoice in an inherited cult, 
heedless of aught but their existence today. 
Others of them will stop short of this, yet 
strip the central figure of every actual 
quality that points beyond, and proclaim 
a doctrine of the Divine Immanence little 
removed from Pantheism. A recent expres- 
sion to this view in its unrelieved crudity 
has been given by Mr. Thompson, the Dean 
of Divinity of Magdalen College, Oxford. 
His work is not valuable except as evidence. 
It shews the inwardness of much that in 
other forms allures many minds. For in 
that work the immanent logic of a great 
deal of the critical movement is seen to 



SION 187 

develop itself into an assured repudiation 
of all influence from a world beyond. 

What I want to emphasize is that within 
this naturalistic interpretation every va- 
riety of sentiment and moral ideal is 
possible, from Pagan to Catholic ethics. 
All, however, unite to repudiate the idea 
of a unique revelation and of supernat- 
ural grace or facts; all are founded on 
rejection of "supernaturalism" in the usual 
sense. 

Now let us consider the opposing view. 
That asserts that there is about this episode 
something more than human, and that its 
differences from all other religions and 
philosophies are more important than its 
resemblances. It is to man the supreme 
guarantee of a something more than the 
visible world and its development, even if 
that visible world be thought of as spiritual. 
It marks the entrance into this life of 
forces from a spirit world beyond, and in 
this sense is nothing if not other-worldly. 
Of course its human aspects are not to be 
denied, and the chief perplexities arise 
from the refusal of Christians to treat the 



188 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

life of Jesus as a mere "theophany." As 
Canon Simpson says 1 : 

"The history of Christian doctrine 
made it abundantly clear that men have 
found it harder to represent to them- 
selves the real manhood of the Son of 
God than the perfect Godhead of the Son 
of Man." 

Nor need we suppose that there is any- 
thing final in the efforts hitherto made to 
express this double-faced fact. The recent 
work of Dr. Sanday on Christologies Ancient 
and Modern is alone evidence of this; for 
here is a writer avowedly Nicene seeking the 
explanation in the doctrine of the subliminal 
self. How far the Church will go in this 
direction one cannot at this stage predict, 
but even the suggestion of it is a proof that 
finality is not reached — nor indeed is it 
likely to be. 2 Of a fact so essentially mys- 
terious as the entrance into human life, 
under human conditions, of that Life, which 
always burns and is never extinguished, all 
our statements must be so much below the 
truth that now one side and now the other 
will be emphasized. The belief is in the 
supernatural character of this, that great 



SION 189 

mystery of godliness, of which S. Paul 
spoke, "God manifest in the flesh." 

The form of this belief may vary in differ- 
ent ages, and as Dr. Sanday illustrates, take 
on a different colour, even while the sym- 
bolic expression remains unchanged; other- 
wise the creeds would be something other 
than symbols. All, however, who hold it 
would agree in this — that in the story 
told in the Gospels there is evidence of a 
peculiar outbreak from the spirit world. 
It is not merely an uprush of religious emo- 
tion. This " irruption " of the Divine into 
the world of phenomena guarantees the 
nature of God as being Love; it destroys 
the presuppositions of naturalism, in that 
it assures to each of us a life hereafter and 
delivers us from that strange disease of the 
will we call "sin/' restoring the broken 
unity between the soul and God; of Whom 
it reveals so much as can be shewn in human 
life. 

In the former of these two views, even, 
if we take it as it is nearest to the Nicene 
faith, the Christian fact has much teaching 
for man. But that teaching is of the highest 
to which human love can aspire. It is a 



190 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

doctrine of man. On the latter view the 
teaching is of the depths to which God's 
Love can descend. It is a doctrine of God. 
He stooped to conquer. The unique note 
of the Christian religion is the humility 
of God. Further, the one interpretation 
need never get beyond the Divine Imma- 
nence. The other reveals the Divine Tran- 
scendence. It preserves the distinctness of 
man and God alike, while it asserts that 
God is able so to limit Himself as to be- 
come Incarnate. It is needless to develop 
at length what this view involves. For it 
has embodied itself in the Christian Church. 
The whole Catholic Evangelical theology 
of grace, of the Sacraments, of the Atone- 
ment and the Incarnation, is but its expres- 
sion; inadequate, it is true, and figurative, 
but generated in the need of defending the 
one supreme fact of the Divine and super- 
natural character of the whole order against 
interpretations which in the long run would 
have destroyed it. 

But we must not exaggerate. This view, 
like its contrary, may be held with the 
widest differences of detail. It is, as a fact, 



SION 191 

maintained by many whom a rigid ortho- 
doxy would repudiate. It would include 
such men as a historian who once said to me, 
"I believe firmly in the Divinity of Christ 
and the Atonement, but I don't believe 
in anything else, not the Church or the 
Sacraments or the Holy Ghost." It would 
include the semi-Arian, who worships Christ 
as Lord and holds firmly to the Logos- 
doctrine, but has difficulties about even the 
simplest of the Creeds. It would include 
those who adhered to the formula suggested 
by Dr. Denny, "I believe in God through 
Jesus Christ/ 5 provided that formula were 
interpreted according to the previous argu- 
ment of the writer. It would include some 
who deny certain facts such as the Birth 
Story or the Empty Tomb, which seem to 
most of us integral to the supernatural 
nature of the whole. That may be true. 
For all that, it is not to be gainsaid that 
Professor Burkitt, 3 in his pamphlet on The 
Failure of Liberal Christianity, while he re- 
jects *those facts, argues most convincingly 
that the evidence of the documents as a 
whole compels the supernatural theory of 
the origin of the Church and justifies the 



192 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Athanasian Creed. It is hardly too much to 
describe this pamphlet as epoch-making, for 
it marks the way in which a devout mind, 
arguing from the critical basis, but unde- 
terred by prepossessions against the super- 
natural, is driven to a position which is 
fundamentally that of the Church. A 
somewhat similar view is that of Dr. 
Forsyth in his work on The Person and 
Place of Jesus Christ. I need hardly add 
that this view of the fundamentally mys- 
terious nature of the New Testament 
experience is held by men owning every 
kind of ecclesiastical allegiance. On the 
other hand from this standpoint, there 
would be excluded many of the ultra- 
modernists, strong though they may be 
in the sense of the value both of the Church 
and Sacraments, and many "liberal" theo- 
logians, who would rule out the "supra- 
normal." Professor Denny, Professor Bur- 
kitt, Dr. Forsyth, Dr. Garvie, Dr. Orr, Dr. 
Seeberg, Dr. Knowling, Mr. Wilfrid Ward, 
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, the Bishops of 
Birmingham and Durham, Evangelical Dis- 
senters and Ultramontanes may seem a 
rather heterogeneous company. Doubtless 






SION 193 

many of them would condemn as woefully- 
inadequate the theology that contents the 
other. Yet all have this in common. They 
have crossed the Rubicon. All are on the 
other side of the line which divides the 
natural from the supernatural theory of the 
origin of Christianity. All are unable to 
believe that the reduced Christianity dear 
to the Teutonic savant comes at all close to 
the facts; all are at one in their refusal 
to surrender the supernatural in deference 
to the naturalistic bias. 

It is right to put the question in this 
broad manner, as one which is concerned 
with our view of the nature of the expe- 
rience as a whole. We are putting the 
cart before the horse, when we argue, 
as though the question were first and fore- 
most concerned with dogma. Dogma only 
brings out the implications of the super- 
natural view, and it cannot be arrived at 
independently or argued about as consisting 
of so many isolated propositions. The 
Creeds are the intellectual expressions of 
this faith, developed in the fife of the 
Church, and they guard its essential nature, 

14 



194 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

which is to be supernatural. It is this 
supernatural character which is its differ- 
entia. On this we have to make up our 
mind before, not after, we consider the 
Creeds. The enquirer must decide whether 
or no these supernatural claims were made, 
and then whether he can accept them. 
Either you fit Jesus Christ into the normal 
categories or He eludes them. The Chris- 
tian Church is either one episode in the 
natural development of mankind or it is 
something superadded. That is the real 
difficulty involved in the Incarnation and 
in the higher view about Church and Sac- 
raments. Whatever class you put them in, 
you find it inadequate. Treat Jesus Christ 
as purely human and you fail to explain 
most of His characteristic deeds and words, 
even if you give up the theory of fraud. 
Treat Him as God, and His essential human 
quality, His local temperament and hori- 
zons, are hard to comprehend; though 
indeed we never could say beforehand what 
limitations of power and knowledge an 
Incarnation does not involve. The Atha- 
nasian Creed and all Catholic theology puts 
the two sides together, but does not remove 



SION 195 

the difficulty. They are never altogether 
harmonised; they never will be, till we 
reach the beatific vision. But any simpler 
creed is even harder. For it compels us 
to give up the facts. 

Moreover, it leaves you without any 
adequate explanation of the origin and 
expansion of the Church. As Gibbon long 
since discerned, the crucial difficulty of 
the enquirer is that of explaining the 
existence of the Church. And indeed that 
difficulty is greater than he knew. The 
Church needs explanation not merely as 
a past, but as a present fact, stretching 
back to the dawn of history and achieving 
since Gibbon the most marvellous of all 
its revivals. All this you must describe 
as either part of the natural course of 
human development or as something cat- 
astrophic breaking the chain, invading 
the sphere of the natural, a gift from 
beyond. 

As in the words of a writer I have quoted 
more than once — Eucken 4 : 

"In the case of Christianity it is man's 
moral life which harbours this contradic- 
tion. Christianity holds that, down to 



196 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

the very roots of his moral nature, man is 
especially estranged from what is right, 
and therefore requires that he shall become 
a new creature and live a new life. The 
form which this conviction has taken in 
concept and in doctrine is no doubt open 
to attack on many sides, but so long as 
the fundamental fact survived as an in- 
spiration in human experience, it triumphed 
over all the objections brought against 
it. But the modern world, dazzled by 
the splendour of its own achievements, 
armed with its consciousness of power, 
stimulated by its craving for a fuller and 
a richer life, has thrust such experience into 
the background and for a time forgotten 
it. And now the problems and perplexities 
of the nineteenth century and our own 
have thrust it forward once more, and, 
with growing insistence, are challenging 
the old complacent belief in the work of 
civilisation and the light-hearted enthusi- 
asm for progress. 

"It becomes increasingly difficult not 
to recognise the sharp contradiction which 
runs through the whole life of man and 
comes to a head in his moral behaviour." 



SION 197 

And again, in Christianity and the New 
Idealism, he says: 

"Its presence attests the invasion of 
our life by a new order of reality, involving 
a breach in the causal order of nature, 
tearing through the existing system of 
connexions, rendering for ever impossible 
a rational synthesis of reality within the 
limits of sense-experience, and precluding 
any monism of the world as we find it." 

Decide this point one way or the other 
and you have decided everything, and no 
mere jettison of this or that detail will 
bring you in line with the opponent theory. 
In the same way that a very small dose 
of free will means a complete breach with 
the rationalist, so here accept the super- 
natural in however small a degree and the 
logic of it carries you right on to the Church 
with the Creeds. Nothing but some acci- 
dent of temper or training will hinder you 
from being one with that great continuous 
body, which enshrines this supernatural 
life in all its fulness. Deny this supra- 
human character, and however much you 
may gild your unbelief with phrases of 
reverence, and even emphasize devotion 



198 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

to the Church of your fathers, and desire 
to be part of the main stream of Christian 
life, you are yet on the inclined plane 
which leads far away from it. To scientific 
fatalism in some form or other, if not the 
individual (for he does not always develop 
the logic of his position), at least the society, 
which adopts such denial, will come at the 
last. 

The problem, then, is one as to the 
transcendental or the normal character 
of this experience or group of experiences; 
the central facts as recorded in the New 
Testament, the impression made by them 
at the time, and the continuance of that 
impression in the Church and its individual 
members. Christian theology issues from 
the attempt to guard this truth of the 
supernatural character of this experience 
against interpretations which explicitly or 
implicitly involve its denial. Whether the 
theology be coherent or well-expressed is 
one thing. That its essence is this faith 
in a mystery is unquestioned alike by 
friend and foe. 

I state the problem in this way because 
it seems to me an error to treat the topic 



SION 199 

analytically; isolating this or that detail 
and then either from the traditional stand- 
point or its opposite building up a series 
of conclusions. As a fact, we are dealing 
not with a number of isolated events appar- 
ently marvellous, each to be discussed in 
vacuo, but with a great experience of human 
life extending from the converted sinner of 
today right back to "that strange man 
upon the Cross" and all that He implies. 
The question is, What does that experience 
mean? Even in regard to the New Testa- 
ment it is a mistake to adopt this purely 
analytic method. It is not the Virgin 
Birth, or the Empty Tomb, or the Trans- 
figuration, or the feeding of the five thou- 
sand, or the walking on the water, or the 
tremendous claims of Christ, or the stories 
of the Apostles, or the experience of S. 
Paul, or the theory of S. John; it is all these 
things together. Or, to be accurate, it 
is the atmosphere, the mental world, in 
which all these things take place, that is 
in question. Men would never have made 
this error were it not for our habit of making 
words and single events a screen which veils 
life instead of revealing it, and discussing 



200 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

not real experience, but the articulate ex- 
pression of it, which never is complete and 
can at best be no more than symbolic. 

The first thing to decide is our view of 
the total character of the narrative, taken 
in unison with its living issues (as the title 
of the Kaiser is part of the evidence for 
the power of Julius Caesar). When we have 
made up our minds as to what that character 
is, and further, being what it is, whether we 
can accept or reject it, then and then only 
shall we be ready to discuss it in detail. 

As a matter of fact, this is precisely 
what is done. Half of the anti-Christian 
criticism of the records, while it professes 
to be an open enquiry, is in reality only an 
examination of this or that detail with the 
humanist interpretations of the narrative as 
a whole taken for granted, though carefully 
concealed. Too many writers on the ortho- 
dox side have been content to examine 
these theories, without considering the pre- 
suppositions; thus tacitly offering a victory 
to their adversaries. 

But this is not all. If the problem be 
primarily one about the total impression, 



SION 201 

it does not need a specialist to determine 
its results. On the general character of 
the alleged occurrences of the Gospel, or 
the experience of the early Church, as 
mirrored in S. Paul, in S. Peter, in S. John, 
it needs no specialist nor any great knowl- 
edge to come to a valid conclusion. In this 
matter the appeal to the plain man and that 
to the historic consciousness of Christen- 
dom comes to the same thing. Such mat- 
ters as the piecing together of the narratives, 
the priority of S. Mark, or the nature of Q, 
or the genuineness of S. Peter's and S. Jude's 
Epistles, can only be argued by specialists. 
But no expert is needed to pronounce on 
the general character of the impression 
created by the accounts of Jesus or the 
experiences of S. Paul. Nothing is needed 
but attentive reading, and the critics who 
would cut all the extraordinary elements 
and leave a caput mortuum of morality 
touched with emotion (yet still to be called 
Christianity) would never have won half 
their vogue had not the reading of the New 
Testament gone out of fashion. Their 
strength comes from their appealing to a 
world which has ceased to use the Bible 



202 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

devotionally. It was a maxim of the 
Reformers that the Scriptures bore their 
meaning on their face, and that every 
man could be his own interpreter. Applied 
to single texts this notion is contrary to 
fact; for we need to go behind the New 
Testament to the society which produced 
it, just as we need to go behind Dante or 
Homer to the civilisation which environed 
them. The maxim resulted in a greater 
variety of views among Christians than had 
before seemed possible; each view basing 
itself on the Bible. If, however, we take 
the New Testament as a whole, the Re- 
formers were not so far wrong. Whether 
or no he believes it, the plain man who 
reads the New Testament has little doubt 
of the transcendent claim made by Jesus 
Christ; nor does he deny that there was 
an experience of redemption which believed 
itself to be connected with the Cross, and 
of a new life in unison with the Risen Lord. 
How these things are to be harmonised 
may be matters for the Church, and what 
their theological implications exclude or 
allow. How to get them into relation with 
ordinary life is a problem still unsolved. 



SION 203 

But that this is their general character is 
only to be denied by that class of mind that 
asserts that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, or, 
like Samuel Butler, that the Odyssey was a 
suffragist manifesto. The authority of the 
Church, indeed, here as in other matters, 
only operates to protect the ordinary man 
against the excesses of one-sided talent, and 
is indeed essentially democratic. 

Still the point remains, What are we to 
think of it all? To me it appears plain 
that we have evidence of some invasion 
from that world beyond, whose possibility 
it would be rash to deny. So far as the 
evidence goes, we have to do with a unique 
experience, paralleled in mystical litera- 
ture, but quite other than normal. All 
seems to point to the gradual opening of 
men's eyes to an element strange and 
superhuman in the life of Jesus. Reluc- 
tantly, with the slow-moving intelligence of 
peasants, the Apostles began to ask, What 
manner of man is this? After long feeling 
the attraction of His person, and treating 
His healing miracles as a thing of course, 
they began at last to see in Him something 
more — the Christ, the Son of the Living 



204 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

God. Then for a time all their hopes were 
dashed by the tragedy of Calvary, to us so 
splendid, to them so chill and drab. Again 
on reluctant eyes there bursts the light of 
Easter, and in its blinding glare the Church 
has lived ever since. What wonder if the 
accounts be confused, or if there are diffi- 
culties in the theology which guards it. 
The whole thing is difficult, like all ultimate 
facts; for mystery is in the nature of things 
and nothing real but shares it. There, 
however, it is dazzling still, this poor un- 
educated Galilean criminal, worshipped to- 
day as God and starting a movement with 
no real parallel in history. For neither 
the Buddhists nor Mohammed can really 
be compared. It is this, the total massive 
impression of something unearthly, that 
beats in upon the reader. In the long run 
this impression carries evidence of its own 
reality — to all who are not obsessed by 
theories, which bar the door to it. Much 
may be attributed to the mythopoeic faculty. 
But here the simplicity of the writing, the 
amazing beauty of the ideal, the patent 
fact that the Epistles of S. Paul utter an 
actual personal experience, seem to point 



SION 205 

against the view that all that is distinctive 
in the events was created by vivid imagina- 
tion. This is further strengthened by the 
terrific after-results, including the life and 
inward experience of today. It is really 
on account of the impression of the whole 
that we believe in the parts; and not vice 
versa. This is, I take it, the significance 
of the use of the term the Faith as a single 
thing, as it is at the bottom of the appeal 
to authority. There are these three strange 
facts: myself with my failures and aspira- 
tions, — many more like me: the amazing 
vision of Jesus: and the new life that 
came through Him and goes on still. 
Apart from prepossessions, what is there 
left me but to say, "Neither is there any 
other name given under Heaven, whereby 
men may be saved"? Or as a friend once 
wrote to me, "Perhaps after all there is a 
fact at the bottom of Christianity. 5 ' 

I do not say that all this can be proved, 
but I do say that there is a cumulative 
argument. On the personal, the social, and 
the historic side considerations arise which 
mutually support each other. On the actual 
matter of historical enquiry about the cen- 



206 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

tral figure, there is once more a cumulative 
argument. No single detail is conclusive 
by itself, but all together make a positive 
unity which is not so readily found in the 
alternative explanation. These other ex- 
planations are not impossible, but they do 
great violence to documents and the con- 
sciousness of the Church and have all the 
marks of a non-natural reconstruction, 
adopted in obedience to a preconceived 
theory. All that the traditional view needs 
for its acceptance in its main features is the 
removal of the presupposition that miracles 
do not happen. There is, I think, in this 
view a definite ground of assurance to those 
whose craving is well described by Mr. 
Hardy in The Gospel of Pain. 5 

"Men and women need something more 
central than the emotions, more sane than 
the wistful mood of aspiration. They do 
not require 'demonstration 5 or 'logical 
proof; they have reacted from 'schemes' 
and 'systems'; but conviction they do 
want. They want assurance on common- 
sense grounds. Such grounds they have 
in practical life, where no one pays a thought 
to logic or waits a moment for demonstra- 



SION 207 

tion. Are they to be blamed for requiring 
such in religion? Granted one conviction, 
brought out of the facts of life, one clear 
hint of order and purpose, and the spiritual 
assurance of the ages of faith ' might again 
inspire the world/ " 

We are asked whether it is wise to accept 
this Faith. We reply: it is the part of 
wisdom to accept that account of things 
which includes the relevant facts. Whether 
or no we can coordinate the facts into a 
coherent system, we know not. That is a 
matter of faith. There will always be those 
who value and those who dislike a clearly 
articulated "diagrammatic" view. In any 
case we have to get the facts in, however we 
are to explain them. Now this Faith in- 
cludes as nothing else does the facts of life 
as it is lived. Avowedly it appeals to the 
nature of man, as a being who chooses, 
who loves, and who sins. The other sys- 
tems all tend to ignore these facts in whole 
or in part. 

So far as the facts of human life are con- 
cerned, no system has been developed for 
dealing with them at all comparable to that 



208 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

of the Christian Church. No view which re- 
pudiates freedom but in the long run breaks 
upon the rock of personality. Again no 
system which is not social, no purely indi- 
vidualist religion, but is false to the nature 
of man; and sociality involves authority. 
It is only owing to the high organisation 
of modern life, and the support given to 
each individual, that sheer individualism 
is even conceivable. 6 

Religion without a Church is not really 
possible, for not only is man a social animal, 
but religion is essentially social. And more 
and more is the comparative study of 
religion making it clear that men are funda- 
mentally religious. This is indeed one of 
the main difficulties that face the apologist. 
For while religion in general is seen to be a 
necessary element in the make-up of human 
life, the same observation by no means tells 
in favour of any religion in particular; rather 
it tends to an impartial patronage of all. 
Taking it, however, as at last settled that 
religion is a human property, we may well 
proceed to ask ourselves whether the Catho- 
lic Church does not enshrine the central 
experience of the race, and whether any 



SION 209 

of the competing systems is seriously to be 
compared with it. That does not mean 
that they have nothing to teach us. Even 
in our worship we have become too deeply 
occidentalised, and we need once more to 
drink at the Eastern springs. We are 
indeed doing so; the growth of interest in 
mysticism is evidence. 

Speaking on the whole, can anyone seri- 
ously maintain that any other religion is 
likely to take the place of the Christian, or 
that any other society can approach the 
Christian Church in the production of the 
highest characters? All societies, even re- 
ligious, are ultimately judged by the type 
of character they tend to produce. For, 
having settled the problem of freedom, it 
remains to be seen what you will do 
with it. Some of the most passionate 
exponents of freedom at this moment are 
in the anti-Christian camp; they despise 
the Christian character. I do not mean the 
character of Christians. It is not because 
we fall short of our ideal (we all do more 
or less) ; it is our ideal itself that wins this 
scorn. So long as men are content to 
admire Christ and the Christian character, 

15 



210 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

so long will they find grounds good or bad 
for adhering to the Church. Nietzsche, 
indeed, as we saw last time, was aware 
of this and directed his polemic on this very 
point. If you dislike the Christian charac- 
ter and consider that its virtues are vices, 
there is no use arguing about the evidence 
of the Faith. You will surely find grounds 
for discarding it. If you admire the Chris- 
tian and find in holiness "the beauty of 
God," then you will in the long run sur- 
render yourself to that society in which it 
thrives, or at least you will desire to do so, 
though you may be deterred either by the 
intellectual difficulty or by the rarity with 
which the ideal is realized. At least your 
sympathies will be all on that side. The 
question of every calling, every school, 
and every profession is not what it teaches, 
but the kind of men it produces. A man's 
own choice is determined in nine cases 
out of ten by whether he likes the law or the 
army or literature, and finds in it the kind 
of men he cares to live with. So with the 
Christian Church. The supreme practical 
question is what kind of people does she 
make; all individuals are largely a product 



SION 211 

of their society. In so far as you are able 
to compare Christians with non-Christians, 
which type would you wish to be like? 
Only, be it remembered, it is unfair to 
compare the mere average Christian with 
some "saint of rationalism' ' like John 
Stuart Mill, or even to take the least 
inspired moments of the saint and bid men 
judge his inferiority. The Church must 
be judged by its truly characteristic pro- 
ducts no less than a school or college 
or nation. I do not believe that in our 
apologetic we have made enough use of the 
saints. We should argue on a sounder 
basis, if we talked a little more of the 
martyrs. It would not in all things make 
matters easier. For the modern world 
tolerates sanctity rather than admires it, 
and outside the Bible regards it as almost 
wicked to believe in saints. Further, it has a 
notion of what the saints are that is almost 
entirely false to the facts, and before they 
can be made an apologetic argument their 
character, their variety, their enormous 
practical influence, and their abilities need 
to be better known. When, however, the 
lay figure of a most unnatural being has 



212 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

been replaced by the living reality, it will 
be found that they were and are the most 
persuasive of all arguments. 

For it is this sharing in a great society, this 
communion of saints, which is one great 
charm of the Christian life. By it we enter 
into the life of the striving sinners (the 
best description of the saint) of all ages and 
make their achievements ours. We are 
united not only with the living, but with 
the dead. There is truth in the anachro- 
nisms of the Old Masters, who paint a S. 
Augustine, a S. Francis, a S. Chrysostom 
kneeling simultaneously at the foot of the 
Cross. So with other things. There are 
elements in the doctrine, in the devotion, 
in the ritual, even in vestment and gesture, 
which sway us with the accumulated force 
of all the generations who have used them 
and help us to share in "the long result of 
time." All authority is social in its nature; 
it is the life of the community, larger than 
all its members, in which these things grow 
to maturity and wherein all are welded to 
harmony. In a thousand subtle and im- 
perceptible ways this authority is all about 
us, uniting in intimacy the present and the 



SION 213 

past, the near and the far. A man who 
takes part in a high celebration of the 
Eucharist is a witness and a sharer in the 
unity of history. In this worship he is 
carried far back through many ages, breath- 
ing climates older than the Christian, and 
he, a modern, is at one with primitive man 
and also has the promise of the future. 7 
It is then, as gathering in itself the religious 
experience of mankind, that the Christian 
Church makes its appeal, and, as sharing 
in the central stream of the Life, that the 
Catholic would justify himself. For reasons, 
not relevant to discuss here, I do not believe 
the theory of Papal omnipotence to be 
central. But facts appear to shew that 
the further we go from what is Catholic, 
the greater danger we are in of becoming, 
in Tyrrell's phrase, ''pert and provincial"; 
even though our devotion to Jesus be real, 
there is in such cases a narrowness and lack 
of freedom, because so many of the treasures 
of the past have been deliberately foregone. 
In England in the past we have been too 
"provincial," and we do well to lend all 
honour to those who are striving to restore 
in all their touching and immemorial beauty 



214 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

certain age-long notes of Catholic faith, 
notably those which have to do with the 
Communion of Saints. All this may be 
held with the widest allowance for dif- 
ference in local custom and national feel- 
ing, no less than for the individual 
temperaments, which are not intended all 
to emphasize the same aspects of faith 
and worship. 

All this, of course, may be denied. It 
may be said that man needs no religion, 
that it is but a passing phase nearly over, 
and that we have at length entered on the 
positive epoch, as described by Comte. 
Comte, however, it must never be forgotten, 
was driven to crystallize into a religious 
system that enthusiasm for humanity which 
he desiderated, making, as has been said, 
a sort of parody of the Roman Church. 
So far as can be judged by observation, 
however, it seems improbable that either 
the agnostic or the purely rationalist scheme 
will satisfy the mass of men, but only a few 
who live under conditions highly artificial 
and many who do not reflect at all. Nor 
do I deny the extreme difficulty of the 



SION 215 

fundamental faith of the Christian in Love, 
as Lord of all things. The doctrine of the 
Fatherhood of God, to which some would 
fain reduce Christianity, in the hope of 
making it easy and universal, is to me the 
profoundest of all stumbling blocks. Look- 
ing at the world of today, with its masses 
of blighted lives and amazing wastefulness, 
not only of happiness, but of character, it 
is hard indeed to credit the saying that 
there is a heavenly Father "without whom 
no sparrow falls to the ground." Plausible 
grounds may be adduced for treating all 
known existence, the history of the world 
as we have it, as a mere effort of "the 
will to power," blind and conscientious. 
Nietzsche's doctrine is much more than the 
ravings of a lunatic, and at times threatens 
to overwhelm the strongest. At other 
times the view of things propounded by 
another philosopher, Mr. Bertrand Russell, 
that it is mere purposeless vanity, seems 
to come to me with a force well-nigh irre- 
sistible. Certainly no one can prove it 
false. Let me read the eloquent words in 
which he proclaims it. It is from The 
Religion of the Free Man. 



216 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

"Such in outline, but even more purpose- 
less, more void of meaning, is the world 
which Science presents for our belief. Amid 
such a world, if anywhere, our ideals hence- 
forward must find a home. That Man is 
the product of causes which had no previ- 
sion of the end they were achieving; that 
his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, 
his loves and his beliefs are but the out- 
come of accidental collocations of atoms; 
that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of 
thought and feeling can preserve an in- 
dividual life beyond the grave; that all the 
labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the 
inspiration, all the noonday brightness of 
human genius are destined to extinction 
in the vast death of the solar system, and 
that the whole temple of Man's achieve- 
ment must inevitably be buried beneath 
the debris of a universe in ruins — all these 
things, if not quite beyond dispute, are 
yet so nearly certain that no philosophy 
which rejects them can hope to stand. 
Only within the scaffolding of these truths, 
only on the firm foundation of unyielding 
despair, can the 'soul' habitation hence- 
forth be safely built." 



SION 217 

"How, in such an alien and inhuman 
world, can so powerless a creature as Man 
preserve his aspirations untarnished? A 
strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipo- 
tent but blind, in the revolutions of her 
secular hurrying through the abysses of 
space, has brought forth at last a child, 
subject still to her power, but gifted with 
sight, with knowledge of good and evil, 
with the capacity of judging all the works 
of his unthinking Mother. In spite of 
Death the mark and seal of parental con- 
trol, Man is yet free, during his brief 
years, to examine, criticise, to know, and 
in imagination to create. To him alone, 
in the world with which he is acquainted, 
this freedom belongs; and in this lies his 
superiority to the resistless forces that 
control his outward life." 

"Brief and powerless is Man's life; on 
him and all his race that slow, sure doom 
falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and 
evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent 
matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, 
condemned today to lose his dearest, to- 
morrow himself to pass through the gate of 
darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere 



218 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that 
ennoble his little day; disdaining the 
coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to 
worship at the shrine that his own hands 
have built; undismayed by the empire of 
Chance, to preserve a mind free from the 
wanton tyranny that rules his outward 
life; proudly defiant of the irresistible 
forces that tolerate, for a moment, his 
knowledge and his condemnation, to sus- 
tain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, 
the world that his own ideals have fashioned 
despite the trampling march of unconscious 
power." 

Now what destroys such doctrines is not 
demonstration. They cannot be demon- 
strated to be false, or else why should Mr. 
Russell believe them? Their true antago- 
nist is always faith, the faith that, however 
bad things may appear, reality cannot be 
so hopeless as that would make it. Life 
cannot be such a senseless tragedy as all 
that. Just as the supreme argument for 
immortality is the spectacle of some strong 
and noble character, dying in early life — 
for we feel that all cannot be over with it 
— so against the sight of nature and all 



SION 219 

her cruelties, what is there to be said except 
that human hearts will not acquiesce in a 
world whose sole meaning is that it has 
none? This is the final ground of all 
religious belief, whether Christian or not. 
As Mr. Bradley puts it in regard to his 
philosophy : 

"Is it after all a paradox that our con- 
ceptions tend all more or less to be one- 
sided, and that life as a whole is something 
higher and something truer than those 
fragmentary ideas, by which we seek to 
express and formulate it? Is it after all 
the man who is most consistent who on 
the whole attains to greatest truth? To 
most, if not to all of us, I should have 
thought that there came moments when it 
seemed clear that the Universe is too much 
everywhere for our understanding. Any 
truth of ours, no matter what, fails to 
contain the entirety of that which it tries 
to embrace, and hence is falsified by the 
reality. . . . If I were not convinced of 
[this] on the ground of metaphysics, I should 
still believe it upon instinct. And, though I 
am willing to concede that my metaphysics 
may be wrong, there is, I think, nothing 



220 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

which could "persuade me that my instinct is 
not right."* 

"The immanence of the Absolute in finite 
centres, and of finite centres in the Absolute, 
I have always set down as inexplicable. 
Those to whom philosophy has to explain 
everything need therefore not trouble them- 
selves with it." 8 

This refusal is an act of faith. It cannot 
be consciously justified to those who will 
not make it. Yet, I think, it may be said 
to be involved as a presupposition of all 
purposeful activity. 9 And it also will carry 
us on to some view of ultimate reality, 
which makes it at least analogically per- 
sonal. We cannot rest in the belief that 
the world as a whole is lacking in those 
personal relations which are the reality of 
life here, and without which the eternal 
home is no home. We demand imperiously 
the hope of intimacy with the secret 
of all things; and intimacy means to 
us communion, the mutual love of spirits, 
and this intimacy between the derived 
and the original Spirit is only another 
way of expressing the Fatherhood of 
God. 



SION 221 

I spoke of faith as the supreme argument 
against the difficulty raised by the apparent 
waste and cruelty of the world. There is 
another — the authority of Jesus. His un- 
broken trust in His Father gives us warrant 
even stronger than that sense of which I 
have been speaking. This authority is to 
many of us a support when our own per- 
suasion seems breaking. It is said that 
this doctrine is the sum total of the Chris- 
tian Faith; that as the teaching of Jesus, 
it is sufficient; that all the supernatural 
elements may be omitted or relegated to a 
secondary place. This it was His mission 
to proclaim. This involves no difficulties 
and no assertion of the miraculous. Yet 
in that case, what is the use of it? If the 
doctrine of Jesus was a mere surmise, it is 
no better than yours or mine, and can be 
to us no support at times, when "all melts 
under our feet.' 5 Jesus' doctrine of the 
Heavenly Father might be only one more 
beautiful dream, were it not for that in 
Jesus which enabled Him to speak securely. 
If He were not raised above that conjectural 
quagmire in which we "follow wandering 
fires/ 5 why should we trust in what He 



222 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

tells us? The difficulties of belief are at 
times so tremendous that you cannot hold 
the truth even of the Fatherhood of God 
without a view of Jesus, as beyond man, 
which leads right on to the Creeds. And 
so the question at the last comes back to 
the same point: Whom say ye that Jesus 
is? What is the total impression of Jesus 
on mankind? And how are we to set forth 
our relation to it? Can we find any method 
more adequate than the Faith adumbrated 
in the Creeds and lived by the Church, 
of which they are an element? 

As we saw at the outset, it is altogether 
a fallacious method to treat the question 
as though it were all concerned with docu- 
ments. There is no reason for studying 
documents of this or any other matter 
in vacuo. It is always something in our 
life here and now that drives us to that 
study. We shall never get right even 
educationally till we begin history at the 
right end, which is today; not 1066, or 
476, or 753, or any other arbitrary date. 
The ground for enquiry into the past must 
be the present or the future. That is what 
starts us off. Above all in regard to this 



SIGN 223 

question of questions, I ask myself, How 
am I to interpret certain living facts, the 
Christian Church here, myself now speak- 
ing, and the general philosophic chaos, 
which is only one aspect of the more uni- 
versal human muddle? I am not as a 
Christian professing a belief in Christ as 
one who once lived. It is no far-off memory 
of one who told of God, but the sharing in 
a new life, which is nourished by union 
with one alive. Nor, on the other hand, 
do I adhere solely to a present society, 
energising in His name. That society has 
its credentials, which are submitted to 
scrutiny. Nor again is it only in the figure 
of Christ, nor in the Church as a community 
for winning holiness, nor in its history as 
authentic, nor in its miracles as facts, but 
because all these are a source of peace and 
strength to me — me a loving, sinning, 
choosing being. Nor again is it because 
there are no historical perplexities and no 
difficulties for thought that I accept what 
I do, but I find that every other alter- 
native is even worse; that it either ignores 
material facts and pretends to escape diffi- 
culties, which in reality it enhances; or 



224 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

from having a lower ideal it preaches a 
view of things too horrible to be endured, 
save on a compulsion which it does not 
prove; or that it frankly gives up the prob- 
lem as hopeless. And none of these posi- 
tions but seem to me on the whole less 
tenable than the Christian. All these argu- 
ments for faith, positive and negative alike, 
come with an accumulated force, which 
seems to me so tremendous that I incline 
very strongly to accept them. Moreover, 
the total character of the Christian story 
seems to me so strongly to point to an 
irruption into this world of powers from that 
beyond, that short of compulsion I hesitate 
to reject it. 

And so the question must be put. Do 
we know enough of reality to pronounce 
a priori as incredible such a narrative as 
that of the Gospels, supported as it is by 
the statements of the Epistles, actualised 
in the Church and the individual of today? 
On this point enough has already been said 
and I need not labour it further. 

No bigotry is more intense and less 
amenable to evidence than that dogmatism 
which, while proclaiming man's ignorance of 



SION 225 

the secret of things, asserts also that he 
knows enough of that secret to declare that 
it could not communicate itself through 
Jesus Christ. I grant the difficulties in- 
volved in the extreme views of God's power 
to limit Himself, which the Incarnation im- 
plies, but to deny that it was possible is 
pure assumption and springs from a Pagan 
view of God, as essentially proud. I grant 
the difficulties of Christian theology, but 
it does guard its supreme treasure, the 
supernatural, and God's entry into human 
life in Christ Jesus. Once satisfied of the 
generally supra-normal character of the 
Gospel narrative, I find it the part of wis- 
dom to put myself into living union with 
the society which makes that belief active. 
By such admission we are in face of 
stupendous mysteries. Nor can human 
language ever be adequate to set them out. 
The teaching of S. Paul on the Atonement 
and the person of Christ, and of S. John 
on the mystical union and the Sacraments, 
and the whole atmosphere of the early 
Church is crowded with mystery. So am 
I. These things are congruous with our 
sense of wonder in the world and in our 

16 



226 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

own life. That a world so strange as this 
should have as its core a secret so marvel- 
lous as that revealed in the Cross and 
Passion and Rising again of Jesus, is to 
me but natural. What does seem to me 
false to that reality in which I live is the 
clear daylight of naturalism, or the articu- 
lated scheme of rationalist thought. All 
views of the world end in mystery — and 
an act of faith. In agnosticism there is 
no light at all. Pantheism, with its pathetic 
confidence in an ever incomprehensible 
Absolute, its denial of true personality, 
and its failure to explain the delusion of 
it, seems to me, despite obvious attractions, 
less credible and less true to the facts of 
life, while even fuller of mystery. The 
Christian Faith, with its teaching of God 
as Love, and therefore as Father and 
Saviour, and of human life as redeemable 
and as seen through the Resurrection glory, 
if it does not solve all mysteries, leaves us 
more hopeful than any other. Theology, 
so far as it errs, does so by over-rationalising 
rather than by profaning its mysteries. 
But it does its work so long as it preserves 
the sense of the stupendous nature of those 



SION 227 

doings in Palestine and their refusal to be 
classed in the ordinary categories. 

Again we have admitted, and it was the 
purpose of the last lecture to emphasize, 
the fact of the vast differences between 
the mental climate of the Christian Church 
and that of our own day- Any acceptance 
of the Faith as supernatural, even allowing 
for much that is local and transitory in 
form of expression, involves us in great 
difficulties, for it invites us to breathe a 
different atmosphere. It is this sense of 
the difference of climate that forms to many 
the insurmountable obstacle. But it is 
not in reality such, except on the assump- 
tion that ours is altogether superior and 
that the other contains no valuable ingredi- 
ents which we lack. On grounds stated in 
the first part of our discussion I am driven 
to reject these assumptions. Despite our 
vaunted enlightenment, the mental habits 
of our own day appear to me curiously 
superficial. Whole tracts of the life of 
the spirit are to them a terra incognita. 
If certain dominant tendencies continue 
unchecked, we should soon be even in 
worse case, for these tendencies will stamp 



228 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 



out certain inherited counter-tendencies, 
which linger on and have still some influence. 
The point is, that the world needs and is 
crying out for some way of escape from that 
intellectual prison house which it has built 
for itself. Such a way of escape is offered 
by the Gospel of Christ, and that which 
seems to outsiders its foolishness is in 
reality the very wisdom for which they 
are seeking. It holds the open sesame into 
a larger world, the talisman of a life freer 
and less sophisticated than that of the 
atmosphere of present day intellectualism. 
It lifts us from the dry bones of theory to 
the abounding life of the Spirit. It is 
indeed a magic which relieves our minds, 
tired with the riddle of things, and intro- 
duces us to a world where we are free. 

For it is indeed mainly our own theories 
of things that we have to reconcile with the 
presuppositions of Christianity. The spec- 
tacle of man as a free and sinful spirit, 
and his inner knowledge of the tragedy of 
himself, the picture of God as Father and 
Saviour, the philosophy of suffering as 
revealed in the Cross, the Sacramental 
gift at once natural and supernatural — 



SION 229 

all this, if hard to reconcile with speculative 
theories, is congruous with life as it is daily 
lived. It is only when we set up our modern 
categories, useful for certain aspects of life, 
and put them between us and real experi- 
ence, that we find the difficulties insuperable. 
A child's laughter or a woman's tears make 
short work of all such phantasms of the 
spirit. The Gospel is the freshest and most 
original thing in the world, while the tone of 
modern intellectualism, with all its culture, 
is at bottom commonplace and middle aged. 
Of course these things are mere pre- 
sumptions. They may lessen the diffi- 
culties to faith in one who desires it. They 
are not conclusive. Nothing is. No man 
who is honest but echoes at times the reply 
of Dr. Johnson to Boswell, who declared 
there was quite enough evidence — u Sir, I 
could wish for more." God leaves us free 
to take what view of life we please. Against 
our will we shall not be driven even "to 
the truth as it is in Jesus." The argument 
most nearly conclusive is the atmosphere 
of the New Testament and its congruity 
with our own experience. It is the constant 
pouring in of that atmosphere upon the 



230 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 

mind of a man, persuaded alike of his own 
failure and the world's need of redemption, 
that is most likely to bring him to the foot 
of the Cross. For that is where we all 
have at last to come. Christ does not 
reveal Himself to those who are satisfied. 
Why should He? They do not want Him. 
It is only as a man is ready to cry, "What 
must I do to be saved?" that the answer 
will come, "Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and thou shalt be saved." 

For that is what it all means. I have 
spoken of the Church and her history, nor 
could I set forth strongly enough my hope 
that men would enter into that great 
fellowship. I have spoken of her actual 
power today in the social perplexities of to- 
day, and I feel more and more the need of a 
society that has an other-worldly reference, 
whose very existence is a protest against 
materialist ideals. I have spoken of the 
appeal to the individual, his power to find 
himself in the Church. This individual 
reference must never be left out, the mys- 
tic is the deepest of all apologists; and no 
social authority can do away with the sense 



SION 231 

of the individual member. But all these 
things have for the Christian no meaning 
apart from Him from whom they took their 
origin. Neither the history, nor the pres- 
ent life of the Church, nor her Sacraments, 
nor the individual's consciousness of grace 
could stand for one moment, but for their 
reference to Him. It is in Him, as He hangs 
upon the Cross, "the dear dying Lamb 55 
in whom we see the human face of God. 
He calls all men unto Him, lifted on that 
tree of agony, which is His enduring throne. 
The quest of any man is the quest of 
reality. It may be more vigorous and 
conscious at such times as this at college, 
but it never ceases. Man is so made that 
he cannot be satisfied with less than the 
highest, and that he must be beaten down 
before he can be raised up. The pursuit 
of self cannot be carried on alone; it is self, 
as at home in God, that we seek. We find 
ourselves only in finding Him. There in 
Him who bade men die to five is the crown 
of all our striving; there is the Love that 
redeems our tragic failure, the peace that 
passeth all understanding — Jesus Christ, the 
same yesterday, today, and for ever. 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX 



King Richard the Third and the Reverend 
James Thompson 

Some fifteen years ago Sir Clements Markham 
set himself to rehabilitate Richard Crookback. 
His effort was not the first, for Horace Walpole a 
century before had tried his hand at the same task. 
The work was done so skilfully that any member 
of the general public who had sufficient interest to 
read the articles would easily have succumbed to 
the advocate. Briefly, the case was as follows. 
The writers who have made history were all of them 
directly or indirectly subservient to Henry VII, 
who needed for his stability to inculcate detesta- 
tion of the man whom he had supplanted. This 
bias animated historical writers consciously and 
popular opinion unconsciously. For reasons of 
this sort Fabyan is worthless. Polydore Vergil, 
historiographer to Henry VII, was an Italian and 
was not likely to tell any truth unpalatable to his 
master even if he had known. The life of Richard 
by Sir Thomas More has not really the weight of 
his character behind, but was written or inspired 

235 



236 APPENDIX 

by Cardinal Morton, the engineer of the Tudor 
triumph, and implacably hostile to Richard. 

After thus clearing the ground by destroying 
the credit of the witnesses, the critic examined 
the individual crimes attributed to Richard. He 
laboured the inadequacy of the evidence for the 
Duke's share in the murder of the young Prince of 
Wales after Tewkesbury. For his supposed mur- 
der of King Henry VI in the Tower, the course 
advised by Mr. Weller was adopted and an alibi 
set up. The story of the killing of "false, fleeting, 
perjured Clarence" was dismissed as unworthy of 
credence. 

After this preliminary exculpation the accused 
is led into court with clean hands and there tried 
for his final and worst offences, the usurpation of 
the Crown and the subsequent murder in the Tower 
of the two princes. So far from being an educated 
Renaissance villain, Richard is shewn as a rather 
nice man, capable like others of crimes, but averse 
from them. The whole moral atmosphere of that 
time 

" Which hovered between war and wantonness 
And crownings and dethronements." 

is conveniently ignored throughout the discussion. 
The plea set up for the assumption of the Crown 
is reviewed. It is alleged that Richard was no 
usurper, but the true heir. He was shocked to 
find from Bishop Stirling the evidence of an earlier 
marriage of his brother, which reduced the little 
princes into bastards. Thus Richard was not the 



APPENDIX 237 

wicked uncle, but the lawful inheritor; i.e., if 
Warwick was held to be barred by his father 
Clarence's attainder. 

But this is not all. Not only did Richard not 
usurp the throne. He did not even make away with 
his nephews. He left them alive. They were mur- 
dered by Henry VII, or at least at his orders. For 
it was his interest to marry the daughter of Eliza- 
beth Woodville, and as this left the legitimacy of 
the princes once more clear, it was needful to get 
rid of them. Now the character of that rather 
unattractive Machiavellian statesman is not such 
as to make the story hard of belief. We should 
have no difficulty about it if there were any tradition 
or writing in its favour. Moreover, it is noteworthy 
that the Act of Attainder passed against Richard 
does not mention this assassination, and this is not 
very easily accounted for, except by the hypothesis 
that the little princes were still alive at the moment 
the act was passed. Against all this there is, on 
the one hand, the evidence of popular tradition and 
all our writers, and on the other the testimony of 
one witness who must have been disinterested. 
The French Chancellor, at the States-General in 
1484, with Richard still reigning, openly denounced 
him as the murderer of his nephews and assumed 
the widespread knowledge of the fact. This diffi-, 
culty was removed by Mr. Markham in the follow- 
ing way. He pointed out that Morton was peculiarly 
active in France and suggested that he had inspired 
the Chancellor, not only with the belief that Richard 



238 APPENDIX 

had murdered the children, but also with the belief 
that there was in England a common rumour to 
that effect, whereas, as a matter of fact, there was 
nothing of the sort. 

Despite the ingenuity of this argument — and 
it is far more plausible than much of the critical 
constructions of a non-miraculous Gospel — it has 
failed to win acceptance. Dr. Gairdner, whose 
knowledge of the sources was unrivalled, not only 
refused to be persuaded, but declared that such 
methods as those employed were "an end of all 
history." So far as I am aware, no single historical 
student has declared in favour of the new theory. 

The controversy is, however, of great interest, 
for it raises the whole question of normal historical 
beliefs. Further, it serves to illustrate how woe- 
fully we may go astray if we isolate each document 
or fact and consider them apart from the total 
picture and from popular tradition. For indeed 
it is a strange chance, if Richard had been the 
"plaister-saint" he becomes on the new theory, 
how all evidence of such a character should have 
vanished. It is also to be noted that this whole 
series of crimes was attributed, not to different 
people, but to the same individual, placed amid 
alluring temptations and living in an age when 
bloodshed was a daily occurrence and the influence 
of the later Renaissance was operating to under- 
mine the moral basis of society. In the time of 
such flowers of the moral life as Tiptoft or Rodrigo 
Borgia, such deeds are far from incredible for a 



APPENDIX 239 

prince in a position which has proved too strong 
for many a more virtuous character. Nor can we 
account for all these crimes as the creation of prej- 
udice or ill-feeling, even though it may be that one 
or two of the narratives have undergone appro- 
priate development; nor is it really an argument 
against the traditional story that it formed the 
basis of a play of Shakespeare. The real difficulty 
lies in the total impression and the universal tradi- 
tion. Of course all this might be the fruit of Tudor 
calumny; at least the contrary must be proved. 
But to a mind not resolved a "priori to discard the 
common tradition such an explanation seems too 
far fetched to be probable. Thus it can be seen 
how, even in a case like this, any sound historical 
judgment must take into account not only the 
documents, but also the common tradition, while 
it must treat not merely of the facts in isolation, 
but the total picture, of which they are elements. 

The same is the case with other characters, such 
as the Emperor Tiberius or Pope Alexander VI. 
Efforts have been made to destroy the belief in the 
trustworthiness of the traditional view, but with- 
out any real success, and with slight changes in 
detail the portrait remains as it was. 

Further, it is not to be doubted that even in 
regard to the most thoroughly "documented" of 
historical facts tradition plays a large part in our 
belief. Creighton said somewhere that apart from 
tradition there was not sufficient evidence to prove 
that Julius Caesar ever lived, and the same fact is 



240 APPENDIX 

proved indirectly by the famous theory of Huet 
in the seventeenth century. In the interests of 
the Papacy, Huet argued that there never had taken 
place any Councils before that of Trent; i.e., that 
the whole of Church history was a fiction. In our 
own day the same was contended from an opposite 
standpoint by the late Mr. Johnson. He held 
that the whole of history from 500 to 1500 was 
imaginary, the deliberate creation of the monastic 
orders, and to get over certain obvious difficulties 
he presumed that, where there was other than 
Christian authority, that was due to a similar 
fiction on the part of Mohammedan monks. I quote 
these cases, not for any value in the theories, but 
as proof of the difficulties that face any enquirer 
who is resolved to jettison tradition from all his- 
torical beliefs. 

II 

This is the first impression made upon the reader 
by Mr. Thompson's book on Miracles in the New 
Testament} The age-long faith of Christendom 
goes for nothing. In his view the consciousness 
of the Church creates not even a presumption in 
favour of any single interpretation — indeed the 
presumption is rather the other way. Now it 
might not be accurate to say that, critically speak- 
ing, the Church tradition affords more than a pre- 
sumption. But that it affords less is not so much a 
surrender of any conception of Divine guidance in 
the religious society, but it is false to the first 



APPENDIX 241 

principles of forming the most ordinary historical 
judgments. In starting to write a life of Bossuet, 
for instance, I cannot divest myself of those impres- 
sions about the grand siecle that have lived them- 
selves into the mind of cultivated Europe and have 
been slowly infusing their meaning into me since 
the days when I read Voltaire's history before I 
went to a public school. I approach the topic 
through a whole world of presuppositions, senti- 
ments, and imaginings, which have built themselves 
into a picture with very little of conscious con- 
struction on my part. True, when the evidence 
is mastered, in some respects the current tradition 
will be modified and my appreciation of its mean- 
ing will be deeper. But tradition is rarely at fault 
in regard to the main lineaments of any character 
who held the stage, and it ought always to be taken 
into account even by a writer who desires to set 
up a different view. As a matter of fact the 
vast development of historical investigation in 
the nineteenth century has not greatly altered our 
judgments, though it has deepened our knowledge 
and modified it in detail, in regard to any of the 
great public men. Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, 
Charles I and his sons, Marlborough, Joseph II, 
Richelieu, Frederic the Great, Maria Teresa do not 
loom so very differently to us from what they did 
to our grandfathers, however greatly we have 
deepened our acquaintance with the social and 
political conditions of their life. 

However that may be, no historian ought to 

17 



242 APPENDIX 

approach the study of any well known historical 
personage without taking into account the tradi- 
tional portrait and treating it as at least having a 
very strong presumption in its favour. Or else how 
did it arise? For this is where he begins. He 
starts from that notion of the character which has 
become universal, which is impressed upon the 
mind rather by suggestion and feeling than by direct 
statement and is a presupposition of the very motive 
which drives him to criticise. 

Now in regard to the miracles, and still more in 
regard to those of them enshrined in the Creeds, 
the tradition of the Christian Church affords at 
least as valuable a help as does the popular judg- 
ment of a king or a soldier. Yet from Mr. Thomp- 
son's book one would scarcely know that it existed, 
and might almost suppose that these narratives 
were some newly constructed hypotheses which a 
revolutionary school of theologians were trying to 
bolster up by a non-natural use of the documents. 
I do not say that the consciousness of the Church 
in a matter of this kind is infallible; certainly it 
cannot be assumed to be so beforehand. But I 
do say, as Professor Denney said, that the very 
institution of Sunday is a standing evidence, too 
frequently ignored, of the fact that the Church 
is built upon the faith that on the first day of 
the week the Lord rose again leaving an empty 
grave. 

The question of our Lord's miracles cannot be 
decided by discussing them in isolation. First of 



APPENDIX 243 

all we must have some view of the narrative as a 
whole. Now Mr. Thompson does not profess to 
do this, although, as I shall indicate, he really does 
write with his mind made up as to what cannot 
have happened. At any rate he never discusses 
the problem about the total character of the im- 
pression made upon us by the documents — 
whether it does not present us with features that 
are supernatural. As I have urged in the text, 
the total massive impression of the New T Testament 
narratives seems to me so strong and so wonderful 
that, unless I were hindered by irresistible prejudice, 
I should say that we have here to do with events 
in a high degree mysterious, with what has all the 
marks of an irruption of influences from the spirit- 
world into that of sense, producing, as might well 
be anticipated, amazing disturbances. For if there 
be a spirit-world behind this and it has relations 
with ours — if even what Mr. Thompson somewhat 
inconsistently admits be true, then that these 
results of such a unique fact should be strange, 
abnormal, miraculous is only natural. 

I believe that this conclusion can be sustained 
even if we take the Synoptics alone, or S. John, or 
the Epistles of S. Paul; though on the grounds 
stated I do not believe that this separation is legiti- 
mate, or even that we have any real right to separate 
the evidence of the New Testament from the con- 
tinuing life of the Church and its power today in 
the individual experience. For we must bear in 
mind that one well-attested conversion or one 



244 APPENDIX 

specifically Christianised life outweighs as positive 
evidence the existence of a thousand unbelievers or 
Pagans, precisely as one well-authenticated ghost 
story is positive evidence about a spirit-world, 
which would not be destroyed by proving a hundred 
other stories to be figments. Speaking as one who 
has been concerned in historical studies for more 
than twenty years, I say that it would take a great 
deal more argument than any I have yet come 
across to convince me of the untruth of the general 
character of the New Testament. The impression, 
which deepens on every reading, is quite plain — 
like a flash of light — that I hold here the record 
of a spiritual experience which speaks from the 
world beyond and has produced profound and 
unusual disturbance in the physical universe. 
This seems to my apprehension the plain fact; a 
fact made more patent by its after-results and to be 
accepted, like other facts, whatever general scheme 
of notions a man adheres to. It matters not for 
this purpose whether a man be idealist, realist, 
sceptic, intellectualist, pragmatist, here he has to 
do with a genuine outbreak from the world beyond, 
and he must harmonise the fact of that outbreak 
with his system or change it as best he may. 

Personally it seems to me that the Creeds and 
the Church are but the expression of that fact, are 
indeed part of it, and on grounds stated above, it 
is the whole fact that is the real living thing; the 
details are but abstractions, and it is to that whole 
fact, as the expression of "God in Christ reconcil- 



APPENDIX 245 

ing the world unto Himself," that my adhesion is 
given and by which I obtain "the fellowship of 
the mystery." 

Ill 

Let us, however, pass from this topic and con- 
sider the treatment which Mr. Thompson gives to 
the documents, how the first and most notable 
feature of his treatment is that he nowhere gives 
any serious reflection to the total impression created 
by the documents as a whole. We shall never get 
a true view either of a character, an epoch, or a 
book if we seek first for the details and, adding up 
our impressions, produce the result as a sort of 
addition sum. Fancy judging a Keats' sonnet 
by the first four lines or Esmond by three 
chapters taken at random. It is the whole which 
makes a work of life or of art. On that we must 
have some provisional view before we proceed to 
analysis of details. It is now recognised by psy- 
chologists that this is the way in which the mind 
works; it starts from a vaguely defined continuum 
and proceeds to split it up into objects. So we have 
to do with our historical judgments as with our 
literary. First of all we must frame for ourselves 
some general impression as to the man, the epoch, 
or the book with which we are dealing, and then 
proceed to deepen, to correct, and to define this 
impression more precisely by a closer study of 
detail. The whole comes before the parts in this 
as in any living thing. 



246 APPENDIX 

Here it is the total fact that has the character 
of miracle. It is there that we obtain that irresist- 
ible impression of witnessing an invasion of this 
world by powers from that beyond — a view which 
is only inadmissible provided the world as we see 
it be self-explanatory and complete. If this be not 
so, we cannot rule out beforehand the supernatural 
character of the Christian fact, and it is as parts 
of this alleged supernatural fact that the miracles 
are to be considered. They are not single and un- 
related marvels, and yet that is the way in which 
criticism of this sort habitually treats them. 

Let us take two instances of this unbiassed 
criticism. The narratives of the first two chapters 
of S. Luke are well known, and their internal soli- 
darity is the most obvious feature. Mr. Thompson, 
however, will have none of this, and following Prof. 
Kircopp Lake, endeavours, by splitting them into 
pieces, to shew that the story of the miraculous 
birth forms no integral part. It is a later addition. 
There is no ground in the MSS. for this assertion, 
and hence its sole support is the prepossession of 
the writer against any abnormal occurrence. I quote 
his words: 

"But probably the best solution of the diffi- 
culties of the passage is to suppose that the four 
words cVct av&pa ov yiyiw/co), without which there 
would be no obscurity and no suggestion of 
the Virgin Birth in the Gospel, are either a modi- 
fication of S. Luke's source, introduced by the 
Evangelist himself, as editor, or a later addition 



APPENDIX 247 

to the text of Luke by some person or congrega- 
tion who wished to make the miracle quite clear. 
There is no textual authority for doubting the 
words. But we know that editorial modifications 
are a common feature of the Gospel. And we 
have no reason, unfortunately, to suppose that 
even the best texts which we possess are free from 
interpolations." 2 

It is not easy to treat this objection seriously — 
it can obviously have no weight at all save to a 
mind resolved beforehand to find some way out of 
the clear testimony of the Gospel. 

One more instance will witness to the sanity 
and balance of this criticism. The narrative of 
the feeding of the five thousand occurs in all four 
Gospels. If the writer's view be sound that the 
miracle of the four thousand is only a variant, this 
only proves how widespread was the story. Clearly, 
it formed part of the very earliest tradition. Nor 
can it be dismissed by a manipulation of the MSS. 
The author, however, finds no difficulty. Following 
M. Loisy he pronounces it to be a Eucharistic 
myth. It had better be given in his own words. 

"But probably the most valuable clue to the 
meaning of the narrative is supplied by the institu- 
tion of the Eucharist in the Early Church. Sup- 
pose an original incident, the exact nature of which 
we cannot now determine, but which must have 
been remarkable enough to impress itself upon the 
memory of the apostles, to be compared with the 
stories of the Old Testament prophets (I Kings 



248 APPENDIX 

xvii. 8-16; 2 Kings iv. 42-44), and to be regarded 
at a comparatively early date as a miracle. This 
incident may have been transformed, by the pious 
imagination of a later generation, into the original 
institution of the Agape and Eucharist. Then the 
account of it would be assimilated to the actual 
experience of Christian worship. At the Eucharist, 
which might sometimes be held out of doors, and 
at which the congregation would naturally be 
arranged in groups, Jesus Himself was still 
present among His friends; still, as Head of the 
Family of the faithful, blessed and brake the 
bread; still miraculously satisfied the utmost needs 
of all who came. Further, it was natural to think 
that, if He had performed this symbolic act once 
in Jewish territory, He must have done it again 
among the Gentiles; and thus the alternative 
tradition of the Feeding of the Four Thousand 
found ready admission to the Gospel. 3 

"It is difficult to see why, unless there was some 
such ecclesiastical motive for its preservation, the 
story of this miracle should have appeared six times 
in the Gospels, and always with such an amount 
of detail. The fact that it is so often described is 
not a sign that the Evangelists were particularly 
sure that it happened, but rather that it was par- 
ticularly appropriate to the needs of those for 
whom they wrote." 

Further argument is hardly needed with expla- 
nations like this ready to hand. It would be 
equally feasible to interpret the whole Gospel 



APPENDIX 249 

narrative, in the method once fashionable, as a 
sun-myth. For no conceivable phenomenon, how- 
ever unusual, but might be trimmed into normal 
categories by methods so drastic and subjective. 
Of course this exegesis can have no weight except 
for those who are resolved beforehand to reject all 
that is abnormal. 

That is indeed the spirit of the book. True it 
is that the writer refrains from denying the abstract 
possibility of miracles, but this exception is purely 
verbal. On page 5 we find him saying "To admit 
a miracle is to commit intellectual suicide." When 
an academic writer begins an unbiassed enquiry 
with a dictum of that kind, we can predict pretty 
readily what conclusions he will come to. More 
significant even than this statement is the remark 
in the course of his reply in The Guardian that "the 
amount of evidence which exists for miracles is 
itself the proof that they never happened." To 
argue with a writer who takes up a position like this 
is obviously out of the question. It is a case of 
heads I win, tails you lose. If the evidence is slight 
or a little confused we are to withhold our belief 
because there is too little; if it be incontrovertible 
we are still to withhold it because there is too 
much. This truly amazing sentence is a reductio 
ad absurdum of his whole argument. 4 That argu- 
ment, however, with the discussion which it has 
aroused, will have served a good purpose if it 
avails once more to bring out the well known 
fact that the question of the abnormal in his- 



250 APPENDIX 

tory is at bottom philosophical or theological and 
can never be decided by the documents alone. 
It all depends on the attitude of mind with which 
you approach it. One would have thought that 
all this had been sufficiently established by the 
classical work on Miracles (ignored by Mr. Thomp- 
son), Mozley's Bampton Lectures. That all depends 
on our previous attitude is demonstrated over and 
over again by the writer, in spite of himself, in 
phrases like those quoted, and others, and in his 
preference of a vast quantity of ingenious theories 
to the clear meaning of the New Testament and 
the whole tradition of the Church. And indeed it 
is very commonly recognised — by friend and foe 
alike. A friend of mine once said to me, "It is not 
a question of evidence, it is a question of taste, and 
the taste for miracle has gone out." That is the 
modern attitude. Only I deny the statement. 
True of the last generation it is less and less true 
of our own. Recent knowledge of faith-healing, 
thought-transference, and the well established cases 
of "ecstatics" and "levitation" are bringing back 
once more that habit of mind which can approach 
strange occurrences without ruling them out before- 
hand by some appeal to laws of nature, or to what 
is, or is not, conceivable. Mr. Thompson's remarks 
about the "walking on the water" and the nature 
miracles savour rather of the "brave days" of Pro- 
fessor Tyndall than of any tiling we have now. 
Thus it appears to me to be an entire mistake when 
Mr. Thompson speaks of criticism as though it 



APPENDIX 251 

were a purely independent science and could estab- 
lish certain conclusions universally acceptable. 
For the moment you pass beyond the range of 
the normal, everything depends on your previous 
attitude towards the supernatural. According as 
your general view is favourable or unfavourable to 
it, so must you approach the evidence. If you believe 
or consider it probable that we are surrounded by 
living spirits who may influence this world and know 
more about it than we do, you cannot fail to approach 
the evidence in a very different spirit from one who 
believes such powers to be non-existent or so highly 
improbable as to be practically negligible. This 
distinction is seen daily in the different approach 
made towards ghost-stories, and I suppose by some 
even in regard to thought-transference or mind- 
cure. Does anyone suppose that Prof. Ray Lan- 
kester and Sir Oliver Lodge, both of them eminent 
scientific enquirers, would be likely to agree as to 
the results of a dozen meetings of the Society of 
Psychical Research? 

So in regard to the New Testament. Not all, 
but a great deal of our view will depend on whether 
we hold a belief in regard to the other world akin 
to that of S. John or S. Paul or whether we start 
by ruling out of court with M. Seignobos all miracu- 
lous narratives because we think it a principle of 
historical criticism that "miracles do not happen"! 
The truth is that any hope of a general agreement 
in regard to narratives dealing with events which on 
the face of them are supra-normal is a chimera. It 



252 APPENDIX 

is as little likely to be realized as a universal theistic 
belief based on the alleged irrefragable proofs. If 
they are intellectually coercive, how is it that so 
many reflecting persons are unconvinced by them? 
In history, as in philosophy or theology, there 
is no likelihood of a compulsive certainty based 
on the documents alone and apart from faith. 
The evidence may be enough to confirm a 
waverer or puzzle a doubter, but it never was 
and never will be enough of itself to convince a 
determined unbeliever in the other world, and by 
its very nature it cannot be, because it is always 
possible for the sceptic to say, with Hume, that 
some form of self-delusion is more probable than 
the truth of the narrative. 5 

Now it is this general attitude towards the other 
world that is the most startling feature of this book. 
It comes out most clearly in the writer's attitude 
towards the Fourth Gospel. It is well known that 
even some Unitarian scholars hold to a belief in 
Christ, as the Incarnate Logos, who are yet unable 
to accept the miracles. But of this Mr. Thompson 
will have none. He complains of the "intellectual 
inadequacy" of the Gospel and lays bare his feeling 
in his attitude towards the prologue. He describes 
its aim correctly enough, but only to reject it. 

"The fourth Gospel begins with a supernatural- 
istic account of the Incarnation. This it propounds 
in the prologue, stating (with a deliberate parallel- 
ism of expression to the opening of the Jewish Bible) 
that the story of Jesus is the story of the entrance 



APPENDIX 253 

into the world under ordinary conditions of space 
and time of the Eternal Word of God. Pre-existent 
with God, He had been God's agent in the creation 
of the world, which now He visited and revivified, 
as the Source of all spiritual life and light." A 
little further on he adds: "To sum up, the aim of 
the fourth Gospel is to place the timeless, spaceless 
person of the Word of God into the narrow condi- 
tions of time and place in which Jesus of Nazareth 
lived and died. This can be done in faith without 
damage to either side of the antinomy. It cannot 
be done in history without a weakening either of 
the humanity or of the divinity of Christ." 

Thus, in Mr. Thompson's view, the whole doc- 
trine of the Logos and any belief in the pre-existence 
of our Lord is a product of superstition. Thus he 
throws over with one wave of the hand the view of 
one who understood the Gospel if any man ever did 
(Bishop Westcott) "The Unchangeable sum of 
Christianity is the message" — "The Word was God 
and the Word became flesh," while it would reduce 
to ruins the greater part of the confession of the 
other great critic, Dr. Hort, as expressed in his 
famous Hulsean Lectures on The Way, the Truth, 
and the Life. It is not easy to see what remains 
of the theology of the Incarnation if this view 
be accepted, although it must be allowed that 
at the close certain phrases not very consistent 
with the writer's main position are introduced 
implying that our Lord as the perfect result 
of evolution is to be worshipped as God. This 



254 APPENDIX 

point is of importance because in most of the 
discussion the significance of this part of the 
work seems to have been overlooked. Certainly 
it shews that the writer is far more at variance 
with Christian theology than some of his defenders 
have claimed. 

Here in similar passages the true drift of the book 
is revealed. It is the total mentality of the writer, 
so far as it can be judged, that is far more repugnant 
to me than any of his treatment of details. Except 
in the form of a Pantheistic Nature-worship, I see 
no real loophole for any belief in a supernatural 
world. 

IV 

As I have said in the text, the question of miracles 
is really the question of the existence of a transcen- 
dent world. Does there exist behind the veil a 
Being or beings of spiritual nature with knowledge 
and powers more than human and able to influence 
our life in the world of sense? To deny this exist- 
ence is to surrender the last vestige of the Christian 
doctrine of the other world. Yet if such beings 
have any relation at all with this life they must 
somehow or other cause that to happen which 
otherwise would not; and vice versa. When such 
events are normal in character we call them special 
providences. When they are not we call them 
miracles. In Balzac's story La Peau de Chagrin 
both are illustrated. When the hero's wishes are 
granted, so far as I recollect the form is never 



APPENDIX 255 

miraculous. The result occurs by the providential 
ordering of normal occurrences. On the other hand, 
the shrinkage of the leather, which takes place 
instantaneously with each new use of his power, 
is definitely miraculous. It occurs as the direct 
result of his words without any intermediary. Now 
to suppose that there is beyond us a spiritual world, 
and that it either has no relation to this, or that it 
produces no effects other than normal, must be 
either to deny its character as free and personal or 
else to lay down that neither in knowledge nor 
power can it exceed ourselves. But it may produce 
effects of this kind; all recorded and, I think, all 
conceivable miracles could be brought under this 
category. I refuse to make the truly tremendous 
assumption that they never happen and never have 
happened — even apart from any of the stories 
that they actually did happen. 

The current dislike to the miraculous is due to 
the marvellous triumphs of the mechanical method 
and to the faith that it is the sole means of 
knowledge. It is frequently due to a subtle form 
of materialism which, by asserting the supernatural 
significance of this world, conceives that it has 
saved the spiritual sense, whereas it has merely 
deified Nature. The whole point of our per- 
plexities is not whether or no this life may have 
a spiritual meaning, but whether it contains any 
freedom or all is determined; and secondly 
whether this face of things we see, commonly 
called the natural world, is the whole of being, 



256 APPENDIX 

or whether it be but a little bit and is sur- 
rounded by a vaster invisible universe peopled 
with personal spirits and functioning in ways 
different to ours. 

Christianity stands for the latter view and always 
has stood for it, and when it be once admitted there 
is no real difficulty in regard to miracle. Of course, 
if we take Nature in the sense of Huxley or Mill, 
as equivalent to all that happens, then miracles are 
as natural as sparrows (both alike being mysterious). 
No one supposes that a miracle is contrary to the 
nature of things, and part of the ground for crediting 
them is that they are congruous with a God who 
created man and nature. The same is the case 
with the rather wearisome controversy about law. 
Miracles are not contrary to the law of the universe 
— it is unthinkable; they may be regarded as 
instances of a higher kind of life with its laws super- 
vening upon a lower, just as man's free action by 
the law — i.e., the order — of his being can stop 
a cricket ball and "interfere" with the laws of 
gravitation. What we have experience of is the 
different kinds of nature, the mechanical, then the 
organic, the free activity of man, and finally there 
are rarely recognised occurrences which indicate 
beings of a higher order. 

There is thus no objection to speak of miracles 
as instances of a higher law. Personally I am dis- 
posed to think the whole use of the term law is 
misleading, but there is not the smallest ground 
for any believer in miracles refusing to use the 



APPENDIX 257 

term if he prefers it. Every fact that happens is 
to some extent new and individual, and a miracle 
is but an extreme instance of this. On the other 
hand, every fact that happens takes its place in a 
series — it is a bit of that great order of the world. 
The question is whether that order is personal or 
mechanical, for as M. Bergson so admirably shews, 
the idea of mere non-order is unthinkable; the only 
question is what kind of order we have to deal with. 
If the ultimate basis of all order be a God who is 
Love — i.e., who is personal and free — then such 
events as the Resurrection are in the highest degree 
natural, they are signs of that Eternal order; while 
the more nearly anything approaches to the purely 
mechanical, the more partial and abstract will it 
be. As a fact, the moment you come to real life 
you find mathematics gives but a very partial 
account of it, and of the most apparently mechanical 
facts, tells rather the tendency than the actual fact; 
for in Nature, as some one put it, we never find that 
1 is 1, and that is the assumption of logic and 
mathematics. On this point I may refer to the 
work quoted in the text, Dr. Karl Pearson's Gram- 
mar of Science. 

The contention of the Christian is that in the 
last resort all the order of things is personal. More- 
over, since on this view God has created a number 
of free beings with a relative independence, there 
is always uncertainty in the universe. The opposite 
view is that, so far from this being the case, one 
might (theoretically) and may by-and-bye practi- 

18 



258 APPENDIX 

cally be able to predict the whole future of the 
universe both in gross and detail, because every- 
thing in it is mutually determined. At bottom this 
view denies the reality of change and freedom and 
treats the world as dead, i.e., given once for all, 
and working out a formula like a calculating machine. 
Between these two views there can never be any- 
thing but conflict, and the various attempts to soften 
determinism can none of them be pronounced 
successful. It is the cardinal question of freedom 
wherein lies the whole problem. 

All this is left untouched by Mr. Thompson, 
who does not seem to have ever considered the bear- 
ing of his views on this topic. Others, however, 
do not leave it here. The doctrine of special provi- 
dences is almost more repugnant to the popular 
sentiment even than that of miracles. For in the 
nature of things the former are more numerous 
and less unmistakable. Still more is this the case 
with freedom. Disbelievers in miracles almost 
invariably go on, as they logically ought, to a sheer 
determinism. This is indeed needful if they want 
one to get a clearly articulated scheme with the 
state of the world at any one moment as the 
mathematically deducible consequence of that pre- 
ceding. It is because it conflicts with this that 
freedom is discredited, and with freedom, of course, 
the miraculous. That the two are bound up to- 
gether is shewn by the following passage from Dr. 
McDougall's new book on Body and Mind, Argu- 
ing from a scientific standpoint for the existence of 



APPENDIX 259 

the individual soul, he puts the current objection 
of what Sir Oliver Lodge would call "the orthodox 
man of science." These are his words: 

"Under these conditions the working hypotheses 
of the natural sciences become confidently held 
doctrines from which we feel ourselves able to 
deduce the limits of the possible; and we seem able 
to rule out from our scheme of the universe all that 
confused crowd of obscure ideas which, under the 
names of magic, occultism, and mysticism, have 
been at war with science ever since it began to take 
shape as a system of verifiable ideas inductively 
established on an empirical basis. Once admit on 
the one hand that psychical influences may interfere 
with the course of physical nature and "you don't 
know where you are' 9 ; you no longer can serenely 
affirm that miracles do not happen. They may happen 
at any moment and falsify the most confident predic- 
tions of physical science." 

This book deserves to be widely known. It 
shews what are the living tendencies among students 
of natural science. At least some of the acutest 
minds are seen to be moving away (at this very 
moment, when Mr. Thompson develops an attack 
based on the notions of the last generation) from 
that monism, whether materialist or spiritualist, 
to which all events are mere changes in the one 
Being and miracles or new happenings and free- 
dom or the existence of individuals are equally out 
of court. His work illustrates incidentally to the 
careful reader how closely connected are all three 



260 APPENDIX 

notions: belief in God as a real personal agent, i.e., 
in a transcendent world; belief in miracle, i.e., in 
the livingness of the universe (on the other view 
it is merely a machine); belief in the true individ- 
uality, i.e., the soul of men and women. The 
publication of this book is a remarkable phenomenon. 
The writer has (I should suppose) no bias towards 
Christianity and he approaches the subject rather 
as a scientific observer than as a philosopher and 
shews the hopeless inadequacy of the popular 
doctrines of epiphenomenalism or psycho-physical 
parallelism to concatenate the actual facts of 
pyschic life. 



This passage of Dr. McDougall suggests one 
other element in that dislike of the miraculous which 
is so prevalent, an element not indiscernible in 
certain words of Mr. Thompson about the Sacra- 
ments and involved in his views of S. John. Miracles 
are corrupting to religion, for they imply a "magical" 
view of the nature of God. Now so far as I can 
see, this widespread objection has its roots in that 
Gnostic and Manichsean view of the material 
universe which regards it as something evil, and is 
at the bottom of all false asceticism and much of 
the Puritan view of life. It is the false spiritualism 
which flies from all contact with the outward world, 
which animates the Zwinglian attack on Sacramental 
grace, and is at the root of nearly all doctrines 
which deny the Incarnation. It is held to be some- 



APPENDIX 261 

how degrading to God to hold that the regenera- 
tion of man should proceed partly by any means 
dependent on the outward world. Religion is in- 
wardness and nothing else, and every material 
means is a bar. This is the basis of Zwinglianism; 
it is seen in all attempts to minimise the Incarna- 
tion, and it is now reaching its complete expression 
in the dislike and contempjt for miracle. But if we 
look this difficulty in the face, we can at once see 
how unreal it is and largely dependent for its force 
on the unpleasant associations which many people 
call up in connection with the word "magic." If 
we are a world of spirits surrounded by a cloud of 
invisible witnesses, also spirits, and if these spirits 
act on this world at all, then so far as their actions 
produce results in the world of sense, they must 
be magical. 

Besides, to assert the contrary is to deny the 
sacredness of outward things and to suppose that 
redemption is concerned with a part, not with the 
whole of life. I need not here labour the point 
that Christ on any Christian view came to effect 
redemption for the entire being of man — body 
no less than soul and spirit — and that it is a false 
abstraction to leave out one element. As Westcott 
says: "The Resurrection teaches not the immor- 
tality of the soul, but the immortality of the man/' 
Now the magical view of the Incarnation asserts no 
more than that it is an Incarnation, the entrance into 
the condition of human life of the Eternal spirit; 
and how such an entrance is likely to be devoid of 



262 APPENDIX 

disturbances in the material order, I know not. 
The magical view of the Sacraments merely asserts 
that God communicates Himself to us by the con- 
secration of the simplest means of common life and 
emphasizes the "givenness" of grace in a way that 
none of the subjective theories which claim a higher 
spirituality can ever succeed in doing. The magical 
view of the world involved in the miraculous is 
simply the assertion that this life is not all; that it 
is encompassed by a spirit world beyond, and that 
that world can have influence over this, directly and 
not merely indirectly. How any believer in the life 
beyond can deny this, I cannot understand. 

VI 

Finally Mr. Thompson informs us, with that 
confident dogmatism which is a note of all his writ- 
ing, that the mental conditions in which miracles 
were credible have vanished, and that they will never 
return. On the contrary, so far as I can judge, 
they very nearly did disappear in the last century, 
but they are coming back now, as hard as they can 
pelt. On all sides that hard crust of intellectualist 
orthodoxy is breaking up. The mechanical account 
of Nature is more and more seen to be abstract and 
partial. We see on every hand the collapse of the 
heroic efforts to force on to the Procrustean bed of 
purely physical and mathematical method even those 
branches of natural science which are concerned 
with life; while the attempt to stretch human life, 



APPENDIX 263 

still more art and religion on this bed, is daily ex- 
hibiting its futility; it always gives a plausible 
explanation, but it does so by omitting the one 
important element which makes the difference. It 
is not with science, but with the mechanical 
theory of the world, that the belief in miracles 
conflicts — with that view which, treating causa- 
tion as the category of identity applied to time, 
finds nothing in the effects really new, and by 
implication denies the life of things, the reality 
of change. Prof. J. A. Thompson, whose scienti- 
fic distinction is unquestioned, asks, Is there 
one science of Nature? He argues that the 
moment you come to the problem of life, you 
pass beyond any possible mechanical explanation 
and proceeds to quote very eminent authorities 
on his side, such as Dr. J. S. Haldane, Driesch, and 
Joly. 

Sir Oliver Lodge, whom I quote in the text, 
affords a further instance. In history we look back 
with a smile on Buckle's attempt to force the whole 
of human life into a formula of inevitable develop- 
ment; and sometime back a protest justified by 
the evidence was made on the danger of over- 
emphasizing the element of continuity. But this 
is not all. The moment you pass beyond the 
normal you find a well established body of knowledge, 
quite inexplicable by any mechanical means. Mr. 
Thompson appears to think that those of our Lord's 
miracles concerned with disease cease to be such 
by calling them cases of mind-cure. But neither 



264 APPENDIX 

mind-cure nor thought-transference are really ex- 
plicable on the mechanical theory. We now know 
that mind-cures exist and have begun to classify 
them, but they remain beyond interpretation, except 
as the free exercise of psychic activity. The 
method, in fact, by which Mr. Thompson gets rid 
of many of his cases is quite illegitimate. The 
now general belief in mind-cures, so far from render- 
ing more difficult our faith in the other narratives, 
makes it far easier, because it lays bare something 
of the richness of psychical power; while it also 
enormously strengthens the general sense of the 
trustworthiness of the narrative. It is amazing 
that these discoveries should be made use of against 
the miraculous. Not only this, but the increase 
of interest in mysticism and certain forms of Oriental 
religion, while it may not always be Christian in 
tendency, is sometimes even the direct opposite, 
yet is evidence that men are growing wearied of 
the intellectual way of looking at things and are 
seeking for modes of knowledge more intimate and 
spiritual, and also for powers that are beyond the 
normal. I am not commending this tendency in 
all its aspects, but its existence is evidence of a vast 
movement of the human spirit which will sweep 
away our Western incredulity and leave such argu- 
ments as those of this book stranded with an earlier 
attack on "Supernatural Religion." The belief 
in freedom, which was rapidly vanishing a genera- 
tion ago, is coming back with a rush, and though 
that rush will produce, is producing, many results 



APPENDIX 265 

not favourable to the Christian Faith, it will at 
least remove some of the antecedent objections to 
considering its evidence. 

More and more does it seem clear that we have 
to do with a universe in which being exists on dif- 
ferent levels. There is the mechanical level of the 
physicists, or inorganic Nature; there is the sentient 
life of the animal world; and the character-making, 
active life of man; in the latter we discern alike in 
ourselves and others many different levels — the 
emotional, the intellectual, the spiritual. All are 
interpenetrating and none (probably not even the 
mechanism of Nature) exist in active isolation. 
But it is, roughly speaking, convenient to divide 
the world in this way. Now, just as there are cer- 
tain powers dependent on the active use of the 
intellect, so there are levels of knowledge and insight 
that are beyond the reach of the intellect and only 
very imperfectly to be expressed by its categories. 
These levels alike of knowledge and of power are the 
region in which events called miraculous properly 
are to be expected — events, that is, not to be 
brought about by the normal activities of the 
physical world or by those of man's intellectual 
scientific knowledge of it. 

It is this fact in which we find the answer to that 
very popular objection to miracles, that believers 
in them only see God "in the gaps" of the natural 
order, or, as Mr. Thompson puts it, the only way to 
save the true supernatural is to deny the miraculous. 
As has been said before, the only " supernatural' ' 



266 APPENDIX 

which such a view can save is a Pantheism. Chris- 
tians no more deny God's presence in the world, 
because they assert His action above and beyond it, 
than a believer in the Sacramental presence denies 
His presence in every time and place. On this 
point I said something in the third lecture. What 
we do deny is that God is no more than the world, 
which is His work and not Himself. We refuse to 
imprison God in Nature or to assert this immanence 
in such a way as to deny His transcendence. The 
ordinary working of natural laws, if we so phrase 
it, may be called the indirect and the miracle the 
direct act of spiritual power. I may be serving 
God equally when I clean my boots as when I say 
my prayers, but I am not serving Him the same 
way — and miracles are no more than analogous; 
they are to ordinary events what worship is to work. 
It may be true that 

" God is seen God 
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod." 

But He is seen to be God more fully in living beings 
than in dead matter, in developing man than in 
brute beasts, in the spiritual levels of life rather 
than the animal or intellectual. So, though He 
may be everywhere present in natural facts, there 
may be some which set forth His presence and His 
power over, not merely in, Nature by some startling 
and unique effect, like the Resurrection; and thus 
we are able to say with Westcott: "Christianity 
rests on the conviction that in the Life and Death 






APPENDIX 267 

and Resurrection of Christ something absolutely 
new and unparalleled has been added to the experi- 
ence of man, something new objectively and not 
simply new as a combination or interpretation of 
earlier or existing phenomena: that in Christ 
heaven and earth have been historically united; 
that in Him this union can be made real through 
all time to each believer; that His Nature and 
Person are such that in Him each man and all men 
can find a complete and harmonious consumma- 
tion in an external order. The Life of Christ is 
something absolutely unique in the history of the 
world — unique not in degree but in kind. It is 
related to all else that is unfolded* in time, as birth, 
for example, is related to the development of the 
individual/ ' And thus, as he says elsewhere, 
"miracles are more properly the substance than the 
proof of revelation," and they are rightly needed 
in any revelation of redemption that embraces 
the whole of being and stops short at no partial 
manifestation. 

True, such acts must be rare from the nature 
of the case. Yet that they occur in connection 
with times or persons of special spiritual endow- 
ment was (until recently) the common opinion. 
For it seems to me beyond question that in the so- 
called ecclesiastical miracles there is a greater sub- 
stratum of fact than it is now fashionable to allow. 
For instance, in regard to the cases mentioned by 
Mr. Thompson, I find his reasoning quite uncon- 



268 APPENDIX 

vincing — whether in his minimising account of 
the Franciscan story or of that related of Father 
John of Cronstadt. It seems to me the purest 
perversity to deny that the cure mentioned in the 
latter was a direct answer to prayer. Indeed the 
view which such an interpretation gives as to the 
writer's notions of prayer is one more argument 
against his whole position. I believe indeed that 
stranger things have happened, and are now hap- 
pening, than we can account for by any ordinary 
means. But in our Western world we have become 
so attuned to the mechanical method that we have 
neither eyes nor e&rs for any other. This obsession, 
which is a veritable superstition, is now passing. 
There is an increasing recognition that at certain 
levels of psychic experience powers may be tapped 
which are abnormal. With this recognition there 
will come once more the hope of approaching fairly 
the remarkable galaxy of such events which we 
contemplate in the New Testament. 



VII 

For one thing comes out more clearly than any- 
thing else from Mr. Thompson's analysis, the volume 
of the experiences. If the reader did not know the 
fact before, he is hardly like to be unaware, after 
reading Mr. Thompson's work, of the number and 
variety of supra-normal occurrences which are 
recorded — even if we grant, which I do not, that 



APPENDIX 269 

he can erase all the cures and treat them as ordinary. 
It appears clearer than ever that the New Testa- 
ment is soaked through and through with miracle. 
The task of removing it is Sisyphean. As fast as 
one is rolled away another appears. To effect his 
object a mountain of critical ingenuity has to be 
constructed. And it is. Theory is piled upon 
theory, interpretation added to interpretation, 
every possible aid is taken from textual criticism 
and speculative mythology, every form of non- 
natural explanation exhausted before the records 
can be "purged of their offence." When they are, 
the reader is left asking himself, Where will all this 
end? If so much is taken, what is there that really 
remains? If the narrative has to be so mutilated, 
why not go the whole hog with the school of Drews 
or Jensen? Even then he has this most difficult 
problem before him: Are the facts, as trimmed and 
fitted into normal categories, adequate to account 
for the martyrs and the saints, for the history of 
the Church, for modern missions and Augustine's 
conversion? I do not say that they can be proved 
to be inadequate if you choose to postulate enough 
of the creative religious instinct, but to me it seems 
a far more probable and reasonable course to accept 
the story substantially as it stands; to admit that 
we are here in face of some unique operation of 
that Amor che move il sole, e V altre stelle, and to 
accept that summary of the experience in the 
society which it created. 



270 APPENDIX 

True, this leaves us in presence of a mystery, 
and no one can assert that there are no difficulties. 
Yet what corner of life is without it? Is it not 
most probable that some of our difficulties are due 
to the very abnormality of the facts men tried to 
recall? A religious account of the world without 
mystery is not a religious account at all. As Dr. 
Sanday said in his sermon on the book, printed in 
The Guardian for May 12, 1911. 

" Can we expect to make both ends absolutely 
meet? Is there to be no margin that we are 
obliged to leave open? Is there to be no element 
of mystery in which we must needs acquiesce as 
mystery, until we know even as we are known? If 
that were so, the field of religious belief would be 
different from all the rest of human life; it would 
have in it less of mystery just at the point where 
we should expect that it would have more. In 
short, it would approximate more and more to 
that type which the poet described as — 

A reasoning self-sufficing thing, 
An intellectual All-in- All! 

" I do not think that that is exactly the type that 
most Christians would wish to aspire to; and I do 
not think that they are under any obligation to 
aspire to it." 

No one would deny the superficial plausibility 
of this book any more than they would that of the 
Jesus according to S. Mark. But both are in my 
judgment fundamentally vicious historically, and 



APPENDIX 271 

the supercilious treatment of the Founder, "Jesus 
was no theologian," does not commend the author's 
thesis to a reverent mind. On the whole a perusal 
of the books strengthens rather than weakens one's 
hold on the miraculous and shews how much it is 
an integral part of the Gospel; how bare and drab 
is the view of things disclosed by unbelief. The 
real question is whether there is anything beyond the 
world. If there be such things as real change, 
fresh experiences, creative evolution, then there is 
no antecedent difficulty and the evidence for the 
great Christian Fact seems to me to be irresistible. 
If there is not, if we are tied to a mechanical theory 
of nature, then of course we must find some way of 
getting rid of the abnormal from these narratives. 
But then also we must reject a God living and 
active behind the phantasmagoria of sense; we 
must give up our sense of a world of struggling and 
choosing men, and then must set aside the hope of 
a whole creation of redeemed spirits existing in a 
risen life. 

The question is not about law or no law in the 
universe, but whether the law we normally see in 
operation, or think we do, be a part or the whole; 
whether there is any real freedom in the universe; 
whether life is really the working out of purely 
mechanical relations, all of whose problems might 
ultimately be solved by some super-Babbage with 
an improved calculating machine; or whether it is 
wiser to think of it as existing on different levels 
— the mechanical, the sentient, the animal, and 



272 APPENDIX 

intellectual, the spiritual — and admit that they 
all interpenetrate to such an extent that the 
irruptions of life at the last level produce great 
and unpredictable disturbances in the world of 
sense. 



NOTES 



NOTES 



ARMAGEDDON OR THE INTELLECTUAL 
CHAOS 

(1) Bussell's (Dr. F. W.) Bampton Lectures, 1905 
(Methuen & Co.), p. 225. 1 

(2) On this point see Bussell's Bampton Lectures. He 
points out that it "is thought by some to be a philosophi- 
cal achievement and an act of creditable daring to call 
the sum of things God" and argues the futility of this 
gilded atheism. 

"It is no novelty to accuse modern Hegelianism and 
ancient Stoicism of being indistinguishable from pure 
Naturalism, of employing terms out of their current 
usage, rather from habit and a desire for comprehension 
than from any conscious wish to deceive. . . . 

"The tendency to save the comfort of religious terms 
without their meaning or object will always satisfy 
many who cannot bear to lose at one blow the traditional 
scheme of life. . . . 

"It mitigates the horror of determinism, and if it bring 
some vague solace to those who are able to entertain it, 
it fulfils that standard of usefulness which is the sole ulti- 
mate test of creeds as of institutions. Founded securely 

1 The passages from Bussell's Bampton Lectures here quoted 
are printed by permission of Dr. Bussell and Messrs. Methuen 
& Co., Ltd. 

275 



276 NOTES 

on faith and sentiment (personal but incommunicable), 
it can resolutely close the ears to outward remonstrance 
on the part of pure Positivism or moralistic Religion." — 
Busseli's (Dr. F. W.) Bampton Lectures, 1905, p. 113. 

(3) "We shall grasp eagerly at any intimation that 
God cares for us, has work for us to do; nay has need of 
our help. It is on this secret or silent conviction that 
Western life has been founded with its strange and anom- 
alous features of self-repression and common action, wild 
personal enterprise, and reverence for custom and tradi- 
tion." — Busseli's Bampton Lectures, p. 133. 

(4) Bergson gives an admirable account of the prevail- 
ing tendency, which makes everything deducible from 
the laws of matter and motion; a fact which, if it were 
the case, would mean that we are all in a dead world, 
working itself out like a machine. 

"Les explications mecanistiques, disions nous, sont 
valables pour les systemes que notre pensee detache 
artificiellement du tout. Mais du tout lui-meme et des 
systemes, qui dans ce tout, se constituent naturellement 
a son image, on ne peut admettre a priori, qu'ils soient ex- 
plicates mecaniquement, car alors le temps serait inutile, 
et meme irreel. L'essence des explications mecaniques est 
en effet de considerer l'avenir et le passe comme calculables 
en fonction du present, et de pretendre ainsi que tout est 
donnS" — Bergson's V Evolution CrSatrice, p. 40. 
And then Du Reynaud. 

"The time is passing when men can comfortably sup- 
pose that Christian behaviour outlasts Christian dogma." 
— Bussell's Bampton Lectures, p. 133. 

(5) Tancred, by B. Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield 
(Longmans, Green & Co.). 

(6) Carnegie's (Canon W. H.) Churchmanship and 
Character (John Murray), p. xiv. 



NOTES 277 

(7) Eucken's (Prof. R.) The Problem of Human Life 
(T. Fisher Unwin), p. 297. 

(8) Eucken's (Prof. R.) Christianity and the New Ideal- 
ism (Harper & Brothers). 

(9) Wister's (Owen) Lady Baltimore (Macmillan & 
Co., Ltd.). 

(10) Masterman's (C. F. G.) The Condition of England 
(Methuen & Co., Ltd.). 

(11) Haldane's (Lord) Universities and Public Life 
(John Murray). 

(12) James's (Prof. William) A Pluralistic Universe 
(Longmans, Green & Co.). 

(13) "B. D." in Pax. 

(14) Prichard's (H. A.) Kant's Theory of Knowledge 
(Clarendon Press, Oxford). 

(15) Joseph in Mind, October, 1910. 

(16) Galloway's (Dr. G.) Principles of Religious 
Development (Macmillan & Co., Ltd.). 

(17) Mill's (J. S.) Three Essays on Religion (Longmans, 
Green & Co.), "On Nature," pp. 29, 30. 

(18) Pearson's (Prof. Karl) The Grammar of Science, 
3rd Edition (A. & C. Black), p. 153-4. 

It is fair to say that the writer furnishes a mathemati- 
cal proof, which in his view is conclusive, that "miracles 
are incredible" (p. 142), and indeed he would appar- 
ently be willing to persecute all believers in mystical or 
ecstatic state as pernicious to social welfare (p. 138). 
But it does not seem that this position is consistent with 
that taken up in a later chapter on "Contingency and 
Correlation." Mr. R. A. Bray, in an article in the 
Daily News, called attention to the significance of Pro- 
fessor Pearson's treatment of causation, and agreed that 
his view leads right on to some such view of the world 
as that outlined by M. Bergson. The point here to note 



278 NOTES 

is the insistence on the individuality of things and the 
contingency in all events and the discarding of the idea 
of absolute fixity. Certainly if the Christian view be 
true that this world is encompassed by an invisible world 
of spirits, then that this activity should be responsible 
for that kind of variation we term miracle is natural 
enough. He points out that "all the universe provides 
man is likeness in variations; he has thrust function into 
it, because he desired to economise his limited intellectual 
energy" (p. 167). No believer in the fact of miracles can 
surely want more than this. "We have tried to get all 
things under a perfectly inelastic category of cause and 
effect. It has led to our disregarding the fundamental 
truth that nothing in the universe repeats itself." The 
writer of course disbelieves in will as a cause and refuses 
to consider it as in any way different from other phenomena 
of sequence. But he certainly shows how on the side of 
science, if he accurately represents it, it is nonsense to talk 
of the absurdity of such events as the Resurrection on 
the hypothesis that this world is not all; an hypothesis 
which is in no way ruled out by his own theory, which 
is "purely" agnostic. 

(19) Bierbaum's (Prof. Otto J.), Dostoieffsky and 
Nietzsche, Hibbert Journal, July, 1911, pp. 827-8, 837. 

(20) Garrod's (H. W.) The Religion of all Good Men 
(Constable & Co., Ltd.). 

(21) Sturt's (H.) The Idea of a Free Church (Mac 
millan & Co., Ltd.). 

(22) Hay's (J. S.) The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus 
(Macmillan & Co., Ltd.). 

(23) In the Hibbert Journal, October, 1910. 

(24) In the Interpreter, October, 1910. 

(25) Lodge's (Sir Oliver) The Christian Idea of Ood 
(Hibbert Journal, July, 1911, p. 704). 



NOTES 279 

"The modern superstition about the universe is that, 
being suffused with law and order, it contains nothing 
personal, nothing indeterminate, nothing unforseen; that 
there is no room for the free activity of intelligent beings, 
that everything is mechanically determined, so that given 
the velocity and acceleration and position of every atom 
at any instant the whole future would be unravelled by 
sufficient mathematical power. The doctrine of Chris- 
tianity and Determinism is supposed to be based upon 
experience. But experience includes experience of the 
actions of human beings; and some of them certainly 
appear to be of a capricious and undetermined character. 
Or without considering human beings, watch the orbits 
of a group of flies as they play; they are manifestly not 
controlled completely by mechanical laws as are the mo- 
tions of the planets. The simplest view of their activity 
is that it is self-determined, that they are flying about 
at their own will, and turning when and where they choose. 
The conservation of energy has nothing to say against it. 
Here we see free-will in its simplest form. To suppose 
anything else in such a case; to suppose that every twist 
could have been predicted through all eternity, is to intro- 
duce preternatural complexity, and is quite unnecessary. 
Why not assume what is manifestly the truth, that free- 
will exists and has to be reckoned with, that the universe 
is not a machine subject to outside forces, but a living 
organism with initiations of its own; and that the laws 
which govern it, though they include mechanical and 
physical and chemical laws, are not limited to those, but 
involve other and higher abstractions which may per- 
haps some day be formulated for life and mind and 
spirit?" 

And further on he continues (710) in reference to the 
influence of departed spirits: 



280 NOTES 

"The region of the miraculous, it is called, and the bare 
possibility of its existence has been hastily and illegiti- 
mately denied. But so long as we do not imagine it to 
be a region denuded of a Law and Order of its own, akin 
to the law and order of the psychological realm, our denial 
has no foundation. The existence of such a region may 
be established by experience; its non-existence cannot be 
established, for non-experience of it might merely mean 
that, owing to deficiencies of our sense organs, it was 
beyond our ken. In judging from what are called mira- 
cles, we must be guided by historical evidence and liter- 
ary criticism. We need not urge a priori objections 
to them on scientific grounds. They need be no more 
impossible, no more lawless than the interference of a 
human being would seem to a colony of ants or bees." 

(26) "It is time that attention was directed to the 
forces, intellectual and social, which are slowly but surely 
dissolving our Western civilisation." — BusselPs Bamp- 
ton Lectures, p. 145. 

(27) "There is a very large audience waiting, quite 
free from a priori notions of the possibility of a reve- 
lation, from any understanding of mere historic accu- 
racy — waiting, I say, for an answer to this question, 
which has recently gained in loudness and insistency : Can 
we afford to do without Christ?" — Bussell, ibid., p. 55. 

II 
BABYLON OR THE MODERN CRISIS 

(1) Cram's (R. A.) The Gothic Quest (Gay & Hancock, 
Ltd.). 

"Can we as architects answer enthusiastically to the 
call of men who desire a Christian Church bringing to 



NOTES 281 

their assistance, not the considerations of a tradesman, 
but the fire of an artist? . . . Can we come to look upon 
architecture as a part of the vast language of art, the 
exalted privilege of which is the expression of the emo- 
tions, of the loftiest achievements of the soul of man, as 
they can be expressed by no other human power? 

"I believe we can. At all events we must if we care 
for our art at all except as a means of making, or trying 
to make, a living. We shall have much to fight against. 
We shall find opposing us a great civilisation that hates 
religion, or scorns it; a civilisation made up very largely 
of an un-Christian economic system, a sordid and un- 
honoured society, venal and corrupt politics, rampant 
commercialism, narrow ideals." — Cram, ibid., pp. 200-1. 

Cf. also the following passage from a very different 
writer. Professor Babbitt, in The New Laokoon, writes: 
I "If the arts lack dignity, centrality, repose, it is because 
the men of the present have no centre, no sense of anything 
fixed and permanent either within or without themselves, 
that they may oppose to the flux of phenomena and the 
torrent of impressions. In a word, if confusion has crept 
into the arts, it is merely a special aspect, of a more gen- 
eral malady, of that excess of sentimental and scientific 
naturalism from which, if my diagnosis be correct, the oc- 
cidental world is now suffering. It remains therefore for 
us to consider whether there is any means by which we 
may react in just measure against this naturalism — by 
which we may recover humanistic standards without 
ceasing to be vital and spontaneous or in any way revert- 
ing to formalism." — Babbitt's The New Laokoon, p. 185. 

(2) Arnold's (Matthew) Stanzas in Memory of the 
Author of Obermann (Macmillan & Co., Ltd.). 

(3) Ruskin's (John) Seven Lamps of Architecture (G. 
Allen & Sons, Ltd.). 



282 NOTES 

(4) BusselFs (Dr. F. W.) "Christian Theology and 
Social Progress" (Bampton Lectures) (Methuen&Co.,Ltd.). 

(5) Wells's (H. G.) New Worlds for Old (Constable & 
Co., Ltd.) has an illuminating chapter on this topic. 

(6) Dickinson's (G. Lowes) Justice and Liberty (Dent 
& Sons, Ltd.), p. 71. 

(7) Ibid., p. 129. 

(8) Cooper's (E. H.) Twentieth Century Child (John 
Lane). 

(9) Masterman's (C. F. G.) The Condition of England. 

(10) Morris's (William) The Earthly Paradise (Long- 
mans, Green & Co.) 

(11) Cram's (R. A.) The Gothic Quest (Gay and Han- 
cock, Ltd.), pp. 81-2. 

" It is no explanation of the hideousness of life and the 
puerile mimicry of art which exist today to say that we 
in this country [the United States] have no time for art 
and the other amenities of life. On the contrary we all 
know that art is not a scientific or economic product. 
We know that it is a mental temper, a spiritual condition, 
and we know that it is just as much an adjunct of whole- 
some life as is bodily health. We have time enough for 
art, much more than many peoples have possessed in the 
past. Beauty takes no time. A good church can be built 
as quickly as a bad church. It takes no longer to paint a 
good than a poor picture — much less in fact. We spend 
in a year more money on what we are pleased to call art 
education than was spent in Italy during the whole four- 
teenth century." 

And again a little further on: 

"If we are to possess a civilisation which is worth 
expressing itself artistically, we must do something 
besides establish art-lectureships; we must change the 
conditions of life; the temper of the people" p. 93. 



NOTES 283 

(12) Cf. Bussell's "Christian Theology and Social 
Progress" (Bampton Lectures), p. 319. 

"Other religions start from a sublime idea of perfec- 
tion and come down to average human level with reluc- 
tance or condescension. But Christianity starts with 
proposing to the sinner the spectacle of a suffering crim- 
inal; and thus, by at once meeting the distressed and 
the degraded on their own ground, raises on this basis a 
theology which the wisest cannot exhaust. 

"Other systems begin deductively, not with the vari- 
ety and complexity of our life, but with the unity and 
harmony of the whole; they are brought down, puzzled 
and perplexed, to the 'principium individuations' (if I 
may in this connection use the phrase) and to the 'prob- 
lem of Evil.' Christianity boldly confronts the difficulty 
which they explain away with devious or plausible argu- 
ment or else altogether avoid; it starts with the weakness 
of God and the sin and sorrow of pain, and on this foun- 
dation of fact, that may not be gainsaid, builds its edi- 
fice of morals, of piety, and of hope. 

"It is strange that this unvarying appeal to 'faith,' a 
belief in a reality so different to its 'appearances/ does not 
prevent the message from being ' understood ' even by the 
humblest. Indeed, understanding that is to move men 
to action and endeavour must always be of this charac- 
ter; flawless knowledge, which mirrors unchanging veri- 
ities, carries no such incentive or stimulus. 'To know 
one's self as a perfect member of a perfect whole' is a 
definition of religion which for most men would have 
no meaning." 

(13) Eucken's (R.) The Meaning and Value of Life 
(A. & C. Black), p. 139. 

(14) Eucken (R.), ibid., p. 140. 

(15) Eucken (R.), ibid., p. 57. 



284 



NOTES 



(16) Eucken (R.), ibid., p. 72. 

(17) Lodge's (Sir Oliver) Men 
(Methuen), pp. 6, 8, 22 f. 



and the Universe 



in 

CALVARY OR THE CHALLENGE OF THE 
CROSS 

(1) BusselPs (Dr. F. W.) Bampton Lectures, 1905, 
p. 121. 

"The substance of my contention, as of every earnest 
Christian and every genuine philosopher, is to assure the 
one known reality of its sovereign importance and value, 
not merely as a bye-product, an accidental epiphenome- 
non, on the surface of an unending evolution, but as the 
supreme centre of life, and being, and thought." 
And again, ibid., p. 134: 

"The Gospel transfers the interest from a secular or 
cosmic process to the single life. If science can take 
nothing into account but the fortunes of a solar system 
or a sidereal universe, the gradual changes of a species, 
the normal man, dismayed at these immensities, returns 
to his own pressing needs. 

"The individual claims (as we have seen) to be the 
subject of a heavenly solicitude; and among religious be- 
liefs must always prefer that system which assures to 
him, spite of all seeming and present loss, a central place, 
an ultimate victory. Now the Gospel appeals to him 
because in its very essence it is a protest against Law; 
it enlists its sympathy because Right is weak and not 
powerful. " 

For the individualist basis of all true social feeling, 
see the following: 



NOTES 285 

"The conception of life is only 'social,' and devoted to 
the common good, because it is primarily and profoundly 
'individualistic'. Only the man assured of the lasting 
worth and dignity of his own life, of the safety of his 
happiness in the hands of God, can afford to sacrifice it 
for the benefit of others, in whom he sees children of a 
common father." — Ibid., p. 141. 

(2) Professor Drews, in The Christ Myth, sets himself 
to show that our Lord never had any historical existence 
at all. The interesting point is that he does this avowedly 
in the interests of religion of the Pantheistic type. He 
declares that the belief in the historic personality of Jesus 
is the great obstacle to the universal triumph of "Mon- 
ism." Mr. J. M. Robertson has developed his views in 
Pagan Christs, a work in which he endeavours to shew 
that neither Jesus nor Buddha ever had an historical exist- 
ence, and seems inclined to surrender other well known 
historic persons like Montanus. Jensen claims that his 
view is less radical; his point is not that Jesus had no 
historical existence, but that the Jesus of the Gospel 
never lived. See the pamphlet, P. Jensen, Hat der 
Jesus der Evangelien vyirklich gelebtf The whole is 
developed in connection with a theory of the Gilgamesch 
Epos, which is one of the wildest doctrines ever put for- 
ward in good faith, and sweeps not only our Lord, but 
Moses, S. Paul, and others all into one net, regarding them 
as successive embodiments of the mythical hero-god. 
The theory is wilder than the wildest exercises of super- 
stition, and I cannot for the life of me imagine why the 
medieval peasant, who believes some story which is prob- 
ably no more than an exaggeration of a real experience, 
and at least is spiritually edifying, is to be treated with 
contempt, while a modern scholar, with all the resources 
of civilisation at his back, who invents a doctrine so fan- 



286 NOTES 

tastic as this is only regarded as a little extreme. For 
what is abundantly clear is that the whole foundation of 
Jensen's theory is the belief which he shares with the 
ordinary "liberal," like his opponent Julicher, that the 
strange stories must be false. He says this himself in 
his reply to Julicher: "Nun aber der Charakter schon des 
vom altesten Evangelium, dem des Markus, Bezeugten. 
Darin treffen wir bekanntlich auf eine ununterbrochene 
Reihe von Dingen, die so nicht geschehen sein konnen. 
Ich brauche nur zu erinnern an das sichtbare Herabkom- 
men des Geistes Gottes, an die Stillung des Sturms, an die 
erste und die zweite wunderbare Speisung u.s.w. oder an 
so manche Heilungen durch Jesus, hinter die jeder Medi- 
ziner ein ^nmoglich* schreiben mlisste. Das heisst: 
bereits in der altesten fiir uns konstruierbaren und der 
altesten uns bekannten Gestalt der evangelischen Uber- 
lieferung finden wir so zahllose mythologische Elemente, 
dass sie allein schon eine hochst kritische Betrachtung 
der ganzen Geschichte notwendig machen. Ohne jede 
Frage konnte ihr deshalb doch ein sogar recht umfang- 
reicher geschichtlicher Kern zugrunde liegen" (Hat 
der Jesus der Evangelien wirklich gelebt? pp. 17, 18). 
And he then goes on to say that his theory of Moses, 
Paul, and Jesus, each being embodiments of the Baby- 
lonian, the God-Man Gilgamesch, supplies the necessary 
historical foundation. If anyone wants any evidences of 
the aberrations to which the refusal to allow the miracu- 
lous can drive learned and intelligent men, he could not 
do better than read the so-called arguments and parables 
of the pamphlet Moses, Jesus, Paulus, Drei Varianten 
des babylonischen Gottmenschen Gilgamesch. This is all, 
moreover, in the name of an "ernsten, wissenschaft- 
lichen voraussetzungslosen folgerichtigen Kritik" as 
opposed to the "Fanatismus blossen Glaubens." 



NOTES 287 

(3) Cheyne (Dr. G. K.), in Hibbert Journal, July, 
1911. Cf. also the following passage from the same critic. 

"The section which does appear to require immedi- 
ately a fuller investigation is that of the Passion, i.e., 
from the Last Supper to the Death on the Cross. Is there 
any historical nucleus? As the critical enquiry stands at 
present, one may reasonably hold that an extraordinary 
teacher and healer called Jesus, who began his career in 
Galilee, incurred the displeasure of the Roman author- 
ities, and suffered the extreme penalty as a rebellious and 
unrecognised 'king of the Jews.' But is it not possible 
that the statements of the Messianic claims of Jesus, and 
consequently also of the intervention of the procurator 
may be imaginary? . . . For my own part, I think that 
the Barabbas story may be most simply explained from 
a Babylonian source. As Zimmern has shewn, there 
are traces of a primitive custom of decking out some 
person of inferior rank as king, and finally putting him 
to death in place of the real king. On the occasion of 
what ceremony this took place does not appear, and it 
seems plain that the author of the Barabbas story only 
knew of a far-off reflection of the primitive custom in 
the shape of a popular story. As for the name of Barab- 
bas it is surely a corruption of Karabas, . . . which 
probably indicates the Arabian origin of this supposed 
fierce bandit. ... As the evidence now stands, I think 
that Paul most probably knew a little about a great 
teacher called Jesus, and that he identified him with the 
pre-existing Christ from an intuition that only so could 
the precious doctrine of the Christ be made a practical 
power among mankind. " — Hibbert Journal, April, 1911. 

(4) The Commonwealth, Sept., 1909, p. 284. 

(5) Eucken's (Prof. R.) Meaning and Value of Life 
(A. & C. Black), pp. 26-27. 



288 



NOTES 



"As the solutions of Religion and Immanental Ideal- 
ism have gradually lost their force, nature has come to 
mean more and more to man, eventually constituting his 
whole world and his whole being. We do not mean 
Nature as she is in herself — for to modern thought the 
thing in itself remains a dark and inscrutable mystery — 
but Nature as she appears to man from a certain point 
of view — i.e., from the standpoint of mechanical causa- 
tion. Though natural science is very far from actually 
maintaining the identity of the world with nature — this 
being no scientific theory, but merely the creed of a 
naturalistic philosophy — still the creed has its roots in 
the discoveries of science, and there is today a growing 
tendency to interpret science in a naturalistic spirit. 
Our modern era began, at the Enlightenment, with the 
sharp separation of nature from soul. The more insistent 
the demand for a soulless nature, the more urgent the 
claim that the soul should exist in its own right. But from 
the very outset there was something far more imposing in 
nature's illimitable vastness than in a number of dispersed 
individualities; and, as nature's realm continued to expand, 
it was inevitable that the soul should tend to be drawn 
within it. Not only has its empirical existence been shown 
even more and more clearly to be dependent on natural 
conditions, but there has been an attempt to appropri- 
ate its very essence, and eventually to fit it wholly into 
the framework of an enlarged naturalistic scheme. There 
has been a continually growing tendency to identify 
science with natural science, and reality with nature. 
If any difference were still felt to persist, it seemed to 
vanish — together with the doubts this solution naturally 
engendered — before the steady advance of a mechanical 
doctrine of development. This doctrine claimed to assim- 
ilate man entirely to nature — a nature destitute of all 



NOTES 289 

inner principle of cohesion, and possessing no spontaneity 
of its own. Thus it was proper, and indeed inevitable, 
that the attempt should be made to give a value to human 
life when considered as a mere part of a natural process, 
and to shew that it was really worth the living." 

(6) In an Essay printed in James's (William) The 
Will to Believe (Longmans, Green & Co.), p. 145. 

The following passage from Eucken's Meaning and 
Value of Life (A. & C. Black), pp. 94-95, is worthy of 
note: 

"Freedom is essential if life is to have a meaning. It 
must be possible to give a personal stamp to our activity, 
and press forward to a life that is autonomous. Other- 
wise our life is not wholly our own, but rather something 
assigned to us by nature or by destiny, something that 
transpires within us, but is in no sense moulded by us. 
A half-alien experience of this kind, a role imposed on us 
from without, must ever leave us inwardly indifferent 
to its claims, and our life would labour under a paralyzing 
contradiction if that to which we were cold and indif- 
ferent should succeed in winning our whole energy, and 
becoming for us a matter of personal responsibility. 

"But freedom, in the sense which concerns us here, 
finds little favour with the modern mind. On all hands we 
are told that the old problem is at last solved, that man 
is nothing more than a piece of the cosmic mechanism, 
and that only an inexact mind can discover in the machin- 
ery any loophole whatsoever for freedom. Thus freedom 
is roundly rejected, and the fact that life therewith loses 
its self-sufficiency and intelligibility is either overlooked or 
treated with scant regard to the importance of its effects. 

"Since, however, we are insisting on the intelligibil- 
ity of life, we cannot so lightly dispense with freedom, 
and we are therefore bound to ask whether our proposed 



290 NOTES 

treatment of the Spiritual Life does not set the problem 
of freedom in a more favourable light. Now, we hold 
that it certainly does this, and does it in a twofold way — 
partly through establishing truth on a new basis, and 
partly through the distinctive content of reality which it 
reveals. 

"The main reason why freedom's defenders seem to be 
leading a forlorn hope is that science has presented us 
with a picture of the world, a scheme of reality, in which 
freedom is quite out of place. In particular, the mechan- 
ico-causal conception of nature has been carried over 
into human life and the experiences of the soul. That 
such a conception leaves no room for freedom and initia- 
tive cannot for one moment be doubted, but whether it 
can justly be applied to the things of the soul is open to 
very grave doubt indeed. 

"As a matter of fact, the true significance of the life- 
process is not to be sought through any roundabout 
reference to the external world. The decisive factors 
are really the phenomena it exhibits and the demands it 
makes in the course of its own development. If we 
should find it displaying, at least on its highest levels, a 
deep-rooted spontaneity and power of initiative, then we 
should have to recognise this as a fundamental fact, and 
relegate to a secondary position the further question how 
to accommodate this fact with the chain of causes and 
effects. Never should first things take the second place; 
never should the experiences of the personal life be sacri- 
ficed to the demands of some particular theory. We 
need not trouble if our apprehension of reality is rendered 
less smooth and simple. How can we be certain that the 
world must be constituted in the exact way which happens 
to be most convenient for our human thinking? But this 
at least is obvious, that whoever reduces the world to a 



NOTES 291 

mere chain of given phenomena, thereby depriving it 
of its spontaneity, robs it forthwith of all self-possession 
and all inwardness." 
(7) Pringle-Pattison's (Dr. Andrew Seth) Theism, p. 46. 

IV 
SION OR THE CHRISTIAN FACT 

(1) Simpson's (Dr. J. G.) Christus Crucifixus (Hodder 
& Stoughton), p. 266. 

(2) There is a suggestive criticism of Dr. Sanday in 
the appendix to Bishop Chandler's Faith and Experience. 
The Bishop points out how Bergson's theory of the rela- 
tion between intuition and reasoning provides a better 
rationale of the problem than does the rather dubious 
doctrine of the subliminal self. 

(3) See Burkitt's (F. C.) The Failure of Liberal Christ- 
ianity. The whole pamphlet is most valuable and should 
be studied. I am not contending that the views of 
either Professor Burkitt or some of the other scholars 
mentioned are entirely satisfactory, only that they have 
given up the materialistic theory of the meaning of the 
Christian Church. In face of existing attempts to rush 
us into the complete acceptance of that theory, I say that 
this movement is remarkable, and should give even the 
youngest academic person pause, before he surrenders 
at discretion to a view which in the last resort drives us 
to materialism, or at least Pantheism of a mechanical 
type. 

(4) Eucken's (Prof. R.) Christianity and the New 
Idealism, pp. 26, 80. 

"We must insist more strongly than ever that the 
salvation which religion promises to man is a salvation 



292 NOTES 

not of his natural, but of his spiritual self, that imposes 
on him a momentous choice and demands of him heavy 
sacrifices. He who minimises the opposition that is 
involved, and obscures the tremendous seriousness of 
the issue, may easily let his religion, despite all respect 
for outward form, degenerate into a refined Epicurean- 
ism" (p. 26). 

"Its unconditional advocacy of the claims of Spiritual 
Life implies the most vigorous repudiation of all natural- 
ism, whether of the crasser or more refined kind, and the 
championing of freedom in the teeth of all attempts to 
turn life into a merely natural process. Its conviction 
of the wide gulf — nay, diametrical opposition — between 
the condition of the world and the imperative require- 
ments of the Spiritual Life, is in itself a most decisive 
repudiation of Pantheism with its glorification of the 
world, and at the same time a repudiation of all those 
movements, such as Intellectualism, JSstheticism, and so 
on, which ignore the necessity for an inward change. 
Finally, its proclamation of a world-wide revolution 
through spiritual might and redeeming love involves 
the utter casting out of all embittered pessimism and 
despairing scepticism. With its focussing of all its con- 
viction into a Yes or a No, Christianity gives certitude 
to the whole life, setting the work of thought on a safe 
path, and assigning it a clearly marked goal." — Ibid., 
p. 86. 

(5) Hardy's (Rev. T. J.) The Gospel of Pain (G. 
Bell & Sons, Ltd.). 

(6) On "Authority," see a very valuable new book 
by Rev. J. H. Leckie, Authority in Religion (T. & T. 
Clark). 

(7) Cram's (R. A.) The Gothic Quest, p. 292. 

"The established ceremonies of the High Mass take 



NOTES 293 

their place among the few supreme triumphs of art in 
all time; in a way the great artistic composition takes 
precedence of all in point of sheer beauty and poignant 
significance. There is no single building, no picture, no 
statue, no poem, that stands on the same level, even 
Parsifal is a weak imitation and substitute. In the 
ceremonial of the Mass art comes full tide." 

(8) Bradley's (F. H.), Mind, No. 74, p. 171 and also 
p. 154. Cf. also the following dicta of Dr. Bussell, 
Bampton Lectures. 

"All ultimate verdicts, where they are not tempera- 
mental petulances, are ventures of faith or acts of faith." 
— Bampton Lectures, p. 210. 

"There is not the slightest warranty, in the history of 
mankind or of thought, for supposing that we can ever 
sum up the Universe as a whole except by an effort of 
will or an effort of faith. . . . 

"It is clear that to apply any summary title to a whole, 
which can never be known in its totality or in its still 
undetected possibilities, is either an impertinence or a 
paradox, or — an act of faith, undertaken on account of 
life's practical needs. Solvitur ambulando is still a suffi- 
cient if unscientific solution." — Ibid., p. 256-7. 

(9) Cf. the following words of M. Boutroux in his 
valuable study Science et Religion. 

"Chacun de mes actes, la moindre de mes paroles 
ou de mes pensees signifie que j'attribue quelque realite, 
quelque prix a son role dans le monde. De la valeur 
objective de ce jugement je ne sais absolument rien, je 
n'ai nul besoin qu'on me la demontre. Si par hasard 
j'y reflechis, je trouve que cette opinion n'est sans doute 
que Texpression de mon instinct, de mes habitudes, et 
de mes prejuges, personnels ou ataviques. Conforme- 
ment a ces prejudices, je me suggere de m'attribuer une 



294 NOTES 

tendance a perseverer dans mon etre propre, de me croire 
capable de quelque chose, de considerer mes idees comme 
serieuses, originales, utiles, de travailles a les repandre et a 
les faire adopter. Rien de tout cela ne tiendrait devant 
le moindre examen tant soit peu scientifique. Mais sans 
ces illusions je ne pourrais vivre, du moins vivre en homme." 
— Boutroux's Science et Religion, p. 360. 

I quote some further words of M. Boutroux: 

"I/amour fait de deux etres un etre en laissant a 
chacun d'eux sa personnalite, bien plus, en accroissant, 
en realisant, dans toute sa puissance la personnalite de 
Tun et de Fautre. L'amour n'est pas un bien exterieur, 
tel qu'un association d'interets, ce n'est pas non plus 
l'absorption d'une personnalite par une autre; c'est la 
participation de Tetre a l'etre, et avec la creation d'un 
etre commun, l'achevement de l'etre des individus qui 
forment cette communaute. ,, — Boutroux, ibid., pp. 
370-371. 

"La religion off re a Thomme une vie plus riche et 
plus profonde que la vie simplement spontanee ou meme 
intellectuelle, elle est une sort de synthese ou plutot 
d'union intime, et spirituelle, de Tinstinct et de rintelli- 
gence, dans laquelle chacun des deux fonde avec Tautre 
et par la meme, transfigure et exalte, possede une pleni- 
tude et une puissance creatrice qui lui echappe, quand il 
agit sepa^ement. ,, — Boutroux, ibid., p. 371. 

"Si la science positive est, a elle seule, la mesure du 
vrai et du possible, Thomme est moins qu'il ne se croit. 
Car Tindividualite, la personnalite, la dignite, la valeur 
morale, le role special, et la destinee superieure, qu'il 
persiste a s'attrouper sont en contradiction, non seule- 
ment avec les conclusions actuelles, mais, ce qui est plus 
grave, avec les principes les methodes et Tesprit meme 
de la science positive." 



NOTES 295 

"Naguere fascine par la clarte et Putilite de la science, 
et domine par elle, Tesprit humain tend aujourd'hui a 
se ressouvenir qu'il est essentiellement vie, action, effort 
vers le mieux, et a reintegrer la science dans cette vie 
interieure dont, en realite, elle procede." — Boutroux, 
Avant-propos, p. x, of Fr. trs. Eucken, Les Grands Cou- 
rants de la PensSe Contemporaine, X. 

"[L'esprit philosophique] est raison, et en meme temps, 
il est foi et risque: ein Suchen und Versuchen, ein Wetten 
und Wag en. II faut savoir, il faut penser, et il faut 
parler. II faut travailler pour Vincertain. . . . Les plus 
grandes creations sont celles, qui provoquent le plus de 
creations nouvelles." — Boutroux, ibid., XIII. 



APPENDIX 297 

APPENDIX 

KING RICHARD THE THIRD AND THE 
REVEREND JAMES THOMPSON 

(1) Thompson's (Rev. J. M.) Miracles in the New 
Testament (Edward Arnold). 

(2) Cf. Loisy, Les Evangiles Synoptiques, i. 286-94. 

(3) For this view vide Loisy, ibid., i. 937. 

(4) On this point I should like to refer the reader to 
Dr. Field's remarks in his admirable pamphlet "An 
Open Letter to the Reverend James Thompson." 

(5) See Langlois (Ch. V) and Seignobos (Ch.), Intro- 
duction to Historical Studies. Translated by G. G. 
Berry (Duckworth & Co.) 



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